Immersive simulations with extreme teams

Extreme teams (ETs) work in challenging, high pressured contexts, where poor performance can have severe consequences. These teams must coordinate their skill sets, align their goals, and develop shared awareness, all under stressful conditions. How best to research these teams poses unique challenges as researchers seek to provide applied recommendations while conducting rigorous research to test how teamwork models work in practice. In this article, we identify immersive simulations as one solution to this, outlining their advantages over existing methodologies and suggesting how researchers can best make use of recent advances in technology and analytical techniques when designing simulation studies. We conclude that immersive simulations are key to ensuring ecological validity and empirically reliable research with ETs

Utilising motion capture technology to identify trusted testimony in military encounters

Objectives:We use motion capture technology to examine whether or not soldiers unconsciously act differently toward untrustworthy interlocutors.Design:Participants interviewed six ‘citizens’ (confederates) about an illegal activity on a military base. We varied citizen trustworthiness by cooperativeness (either cooperative or non-cooperative) and knowledge (either genuine, absent, or false). Methods:Forty University students wore an Xsens motion capture suit while interviewing the citizens, after which they made explicit trust judgments. Movement data were submitted to a linear mixed effects model with cooperation and knowledge as repeated measures, and interview order as a random effect. Results:Greater overall body movement differentiated non-cooperative citizens from their counterparts, F(1, 1363.5) = 33.86, p < .001, and citizens with no knowledge from those with knowledge, F(1, 1363.1) = 3.01, p < .05. Participants’ explicit judgements only identified those who were uncooperative. Conclusions:Interviewers could not judge whether an uncooperative citizen had valuable information, yet they reacted differently to those with valuable knowledge. Thus, using small-scale motion tracking sensors enables interviewers to identify uncooperative citizens concealing valuable information from other innocent, though not necessarily cooperative, citizens. Furthermore, monitoring nonverbal behaviour may be more effective at identifying threat than explicit judgments that rely on conscious awareness

Interpersonal Sensemaking and Cooperation in Investigative Interviews : The Role of Matching

Theories of interpersonal sensemaking predict that cooperation emerges in interactions where speakers are matched on motivational frames and use a cooperative rather than competitive orientation. However, while there has been correlational research supporting the positive effects of motivational frame matching, this has not been investigated experimentally. This PhD thesis provides the first evidence of a causal link between motivational frame matching and cooperation and trust in an investigative interviewing context. Five experiments found that a cooperative orientation and motivational frame matching consistently led to more positive interaction outcomes (e.g., willingness to cooperate and trust the interviewer). However, within a competitive orientation interaction, the results were mixed. When participants were not actively involved in the interaction (Chapter 3), motivational frame matching during competitive interviews led to less positive interaction outcomes and this was largely driven by the relational and identity motivational frame matching. Conversely, when participants were actively responding to the interviewer at each interview round (Chapters 4-5), motivational frame matching led to more positive interaction outcomes, regardless of the orientation. Participants round-by-round interview responses showed that interacting with a matching interviewer led to more participant reciprocal matching, and this tendency was magnified in the competitive orientation interaction. Chapter 6 moved out of the laboratory to examine authentic military investigative interviews. The communication behaviours within these interviews largely followed a cylindrical model structure, with instrumental, relational, and identity motivational frames being communicated across cooperative, competitive, and avoidant orientations, with different levels of intensity. Analyses of motivational frame matching found an interaction between confessions and the direction of matching: Interviews containing a confession saw more motivational frame matching by the suspect of the interviewer’s frames but not more matching by the interviewer of the suspect’s motivational frames; interviews where the interviewer had received interview training—compared to interviews where they had not—contained more overall motivational frame matching. In sum, the findings of this thesis suggest that motivational frame matching leads to more positive interaction outcomes and greater reciprocal matching, but that the orientation, as well the directionality of the motivational frame matching, matters for the size and direction of these positive outcomes

Behavioral consistency in the digital age

Efforts to infer personality from digital footprints have focused on behavioral stability at the trait level without considering situational dependency. We repeated a classic study of intraindividual consistency with secondary data (five data sets) containing 28,692 days of smartphone usage from 780 people. Using per-app measures of pickup frequency and usage duration, we found that profiles of daily smartphone usage were significantly more consistent when taken from the same user than from different users (d > 1.46). Random-forest models trained on 6 days of behavior identified each of the 780 users in test data with 35.8% accuracy for pickup frequency and 38.5% accuracy for duration frequency. This increased to 73.5% and 75.3%, respectively, when success was taken as the user appearing in the top 10 predictions (i.e., top 1%). Thus, situation-dependent stability in behavior is present in our digital lives, and its uniqueness provides both opportunities and risks to privacy

Safety citizenship behavior (SCB) in the workplace: A stable construct? Analysis of psychometric invariance across four European countries

Safety citizenship behaviors (SCBs) are important participative organizational behaviors that emerge in work-groups. SCBs create a work environment that supports individual and team safety, encourages a proactive management of workplace safety, and ultimately, prevents accidents. In spite of the importance of SCBs, little consensus exists on research issues like the dimensionality of safety citizenship, and if any superordinate factor level of safety citizenship should be conceptualized, and thus measured. The present study addressed this issue by examining the dimensionality of SCBs, as they relate to behaviors of helping, stewardship, civic virtue, whistleblowing, voice, and initiating change in current practices. Data on SCBs were collected from four industrial plants (N = 1065) in four European countries (Italy, Russia, Switzerland, United Kingdom). The results show that SCBs structure around two superordinate second-order factors that reflect affiliation and challenge. Multi-group analyses supported the structure and metric invariance of the two-factor model across the four national subsamples

Risk information source preferences in construction workers

Purpose - Many researchers have investigated the determinants of workers’ risk-taking / unsafe behaviours as a way to improve safety management and reduce accidents but there has been a general lack of research about workers’ risk information seeking behaviours or their source preferences for risk information. The aim of this study was to investigate whether occupational risk information source preference was risk independent (i.e. whether workers prefer to receive occupational risk information from proximal sources like supervisors and workmates regardless of the nature of the risk or the source’s expertise regarding that risk, or if they discriminated between information sources based on the type of risk being considered). Design/methodology/approach - Data were collected from 106 frontline construction workers who were recruited from a single building site within the UK with the help of the safety officer on site. The source from which workers preferred to receive information about a range of risks was measured using a ranking exercise. Specifically, workers were asked to rank five occupational sources (HSE, Safety Manager, Project Manager, Supervisor, Workmates) according to how much they preferred each one to deliver information about eight different risks (Asbestos, Back Pain, Site Transport, Heights, Slips / Trips, Housekeeping, and Site-Specific and Job-Specific Risks). Findings - We found that supervisors and safety managers were the most preferred sources of risk information overall, but a correspondence analysis suggested that workers’ risk information source preference is risk dependent and might be driven by source expertise. Practical implications - Our findings have important practical implications for the role of safety managers in risk communication and for building trust within high-hazard organisations. Originality/value - To our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate risk information source preferences in an occupational setting

Transformational leadership, intrinsic motivation and trust: A moderated-mediated model of workplace safety

Two studies examine the role of motivation and trust in the relationship between safety-specific transformational leadership and employees' safety behavior. Study 1 tested the prediction that intrinsic and identified regulation motivations mediate the relationship between safety-specific transformational leadership and employees' safety behaviors. Study 2 further explored this relationship by testing the prediction that the mediating role of intrinsic motivation is dependent on employees' level of trust in their leader. Survey data from the U.K. construction industry supported both predictions. However, the mediating role of intrinsic motivation was found only for challenge safety citizenship behaviors (i.e., voice) and not for affiliative safety citizenship behaviors (i.e., helping). These findings suggest that employees' intrinsic motivation is important to the effectiveness of leaders' efforts to promote some but not all forms of safety behavior

Rich contexts do not always enrich the accuracy of personality judgements

We test the common assumption that information ‘rich’ contexts lead to more accurate personality judgments than information ‘lean’ contexts. Pairs of unacquainted students rendered judgments of one another's personalities after interacting in one of three, increasingly rich, contexts: Internet ‘chat’, telephone, or face-to-face. Accuracy was assessed by correlating participants' judgments with a measure of targets' personalities that averaged self and informant ratings. As predicted, the visible traits of extraversion and conscientiousness were judged more accurately than the less visible traits of neuroticism and openness. However, judgment accuracy also depended on context. Judgments of extraversion and neuroticism improved as context richness increased (i.e., from Internet ‘chat’ to face-to-face), whereas judgments of conscientiousness and openness improved as context richness decreased (i.e., from face-to-face to Internet ‘chat’). Our findings suggest that context richness shapes not only the availability of personality cues but also the relevance of cues in any given context