The Timing of Adaptive Group Responses to Nonroutine Events

Previous group and team literature suggests three behaviors—information collection and transfer, task prioritization, and task distribution—as pivotal in groups' adaptation to nonroutine events. The results of a study in which airline crews engaged in a high-workload flight simulation indicated that although the frequencies of two of the three behaviors were not significantly associated with crews' performance, the timing of key adaptive behaviors was thus associated. Only the frequency of information collection activities had a positive association with performance, and the amount of time taken to engage in adaptive responses after nonroutine events had a negative association with it.