System Breakdown: The Role of Mental Models and Transactive Memory in the Relationship between Acute Stress and Team Performance

In an effort to extend theory and research on the effects of acute stress in teams, I examined the mediational role of mental models and transactive memory in the relationship between acute stress and team performance, using information-processing theory as an explanatory framework. Results for 97 teams working on a command-and-control simulation indicated that acute stress negatively affected mental models and transactive memory, which helped to explain why teams performed more poorly under acute stress.