A Key Ingredient for Making Teams Soar

Fortunately, few of us ever do. And that’s largely thanks to the coordinated efforts of the pilots managing tons of stimuli from aircraft gauges and readers while communicating with each other, air-traffic control, and the rest of the crew.  

“Flying is one of the most complex and highest cognitive-load interactions that you can undertake in the workplace,” says Sally Blount, a professor of strategy and former dean of the Kellogg School of Management.

A crucial element for the success of flights and similarly high-stakes, intricate work involving teams is rapport—how harmoniously people get along and communicate. But “rapport” is a broad term, and it’s hard to define. 

“We all know what it’s like to be on a team when you’re in flow or in the swing, as they say in rowing teams,” Blount says. “But what does that sense of flow or rapport really mean?” Psychologists have identified three underlying components in rapport: “interpersonal liking,” or how positively the people interacting together regard each other; “emotional positivity,” or how upbeat the emotional tenor is across the interaction; and “interpersonal coordination,” or how temporally in sync the people’s behaviors, language, and pace of communicating are. 

Blount and her colleagues studied how all three aspects of rapport contribute to team performance on complex tasks, in the context of experienced pilots. The pilots trained in flight simulators—focusing on takeoffs and landings, the most cognitively challenging elements of a flight—and their performance was evaluated by aviation experts.  

Across dozens of two-person flight crews, the researchers found that neither liking nor positivity was significantly predictive of the experts’ evaluations of crew performance. But interpersonal coordination did predict the pilot’s performance. The higher the pilots’ interpersonal coordination was, the better their performance was.  

Interestingly, when liking and positivity were high, the pilots themselves thought they performed better, but that perception did not always translate into better expert evaluations. The tendency to associate more-positive interactions with better performance is common within teams, but it can be misleading and is a well-known contributor to groupthink, Blount says. 

“What is critical in the cockpit is the ability to adapt and align your behavior to your partner’s, both physically or verbally, to create more complex and fluid communication,” she says. 

Better coordination improves team performance 

Blount’s interest in the impact of synchrony on team performance has its roots in research she began shortly after graduating from Kellogg with her PhD. As a junior faculty member, she started exploring how people’s experience of feeling in sync affected how they evaluated each other. She found that people tended to like other people better when they experienced synchrony and flow with them. But liking alone was not enough to improve their performance.    

After Blount discussed these results with Mary Waller of Colorado State University, an expert in flight-crew dynamics, she suggested that they study this phenomenon in the cockpit. Eventually, they joined forces with psychologists Seth Kaplan and Elisa Torres, now at George Mason University, and Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks at the University of Michigan. To gain access to flight crews, they collaborated with domain expert, Sybil Phillips, who at the time was leading the flight program at the University of Illinois.  

In their study, the researchers examined the performance of 41 pilots who were flying in two-pilot crews (forming 38 different pairings in all) across 203 flight simulations. The duos sat side –by side for sessions that modeled realistic scenarios and were designed to train the crews to adapt quickly to nonroutine situations.

After each session, the pilots filled out a questionnaire where they rated how much they liked their copilot after the flight (“liking”); how happy, friendly, hopeful, and optimistic they felt (“positivity”); and how much they felt in-sync with their copilot (“interpersonal coordination”). Then an instructor evaluated the crew’s flight performance on a scale of 1 (“poor”) to 4 (“outstanding”). 

Blount and her colleagues found that there was a positive correlation between all three aspects of rapport and team performance. But additional controlled-regression analyses revealed that the only aspect of rapport that significantly predicted performance was interpersonal coordination.  

“Positivity and liking are great,” Blount says. “But unless you can translate that positivity and liking into improved collaboration, it doesn’t have a significant impact on team performance.” 

In addition, as Blount’s earlier research predicted, the simulations where the team reported high interpersonal coordination were associated with significantly higher scores for liking, positivity, and self-rated performance. “When people experience synchrony, they have more fun and like each other more,” she says. 

Effective coordination, more-complex communication 

To build on the initial finding, the researchers used video recordings of the pilots to unpack what high interpersonal coordination between them actually looks like. To do this, they trained third-party coders, who were blind to the study’s purpose, to review the video recordings. They homed in on 20 flight landings—the 10 with the lowest ratings for interpersonal coordination and the 10 with the highest ratings. Multiple coders reviewed all 20 tapes and identified the incidence of 10 common types of communication, from commands to social comments.  

Overall, the researchers found that, on average, the teams with the highest levels of interpersonal coordination communicated more often, especially with commands, observations, suggestions, and laughter. The interactions between these pilots also were “significantly more complex” than the interactions between pilots with lower interpersonal coordination.  

“In the low-interpersonal-coordination groups, you had less communication and also less encouragement and building off of each other,” Blount says. “So, if things aren’t going well, you might be saying, ‘This guy isn’t helping me, so I’m going to hunker down,’ versus ‘Okay, we got this,’ and ‘I see that. What do you see?’”  

A team in sync 

Interpersonal coordination isn’t exclusive to the cockpit. It plays a critical role for all kinds of teams, particularly those that perform complex or time-sensitive tasks. It can facilitate workflow in the office, for example, helping coworkers keep up with each other’s pace and stay on top of deadlines. Or it could support the coordination of emergency medical teams working together to save a patient’s life.  

“Being in sync behaviorally, in both body and verbal language, and aligning on work pace ... is a really important part of team culture and performance,” Blount says. 

When that aspect of a team flounders, it can make collaborative work feel uncomfortable, if not inefficient and substandard. 

“I’ve been in groups where people don’t laugh at the same jokes and you feel like you’re talking too much or at a different pace,” Blount shares. “And it puts to question whether your work style—whether it’s the pace of work or how you communicate—aligns with the group’s.” 

As potent as interpersonal communication is in improving team performance, it’s not a factor that is always easy to control in real time.  

“Sometimes you’ve got swing, and sometimes you don’t,” Blount says. “So, teams may find value in figuring out how they can best communicate before crunch time hits and then establishing guidelines to give them the greatest chance of doing so when it really counts. 

A lot of crucial work “happens in the moment,” Blount says. “We need the ability to coordinate effectively without having to say, ‘We’ve got to talk more.’ Because you often don’t have time to litigate it in the moment.”