Team Communication and Interaction Research Group

Team Interaction and Communication Research Group was founded in 2007. Our aim is to research teamwork in hazardous work environments and to explore its specificities. To investigate how the patterns of cooperation and communication between team members change under high risk environment. Our research aims to explore how teams adapt to different levels of task workload. Our experience has been extended to the military, medical-rehabilitation teams, nuclear power plant and, in recent years, to fire brigade teams. The main objective of the research team is to investigate how teams working in hazardous work environments and how they are able to adapt to changing environmental conditions through team processes. Among team processes, coordination, communication and leadership are emphasised. The teams we study operate complex systems and equipment, which require specific professional knowledge and expertise that cannot be possessed by one person alone, and therefore need to work in teams, sharing knowledge. In the operation of teams, the potential sources of danger can come from the external, physical environment, but also from the human factor itself, the team. Stimuli from the external, physical environment: unexpected, often ambiguous information, information gaps, unexpected events, increased complexity, managing parallel events, rapid but deliberate decision-making under time pressure, pressure from organisational and national culture. Stimuli from internal functioning, the human factor: often excessive hierarchical structure, lack of cooperation, miscommunication, lack of professionalism, lack of coordination in the harmonisation of different processes, lack of mutual acceptance, lack of change of perspective in problem solving. In safety cultures operating complex systems, efforts are made to fine-tune operational processes to minimise anomalies due to human operation, possibly human error, and to maximise safe operation. These standards provide predictability, control, which implies security and ensures a common understanding of the situation. Rules and standards work well in situations where uncertainty is relatively low and where there is a preference for good practice and routine. Rules can be grouped according to the extent to which and the level at which they regulate a sequence of actions: they may specify only the goal to be achieved or the steps to be taken to achieve it.