Teams under stress: Social and physiological processes facilitating teamwork

Team performance contexts are ubiquitous and stressful. From group projects in educational settings to cross-functional projects in organizations, teams are presented with acute task demands. Traditionally, team research has relied on after-the-fact subjective self-reports and archival data. And little is known about the social processes in teams, including the role of emotion expression and coregulation in the face of acute stressors. The goals of this dissertation are to use ecologically valid paradigms that 1) provide new methodological advances for studying the social processes in teams using relatively non-invasive physiological measures that assess physiological stress and can serve as an index of team coordination and 2) expand the current literature on gratitude expression and emotion regulation to team contexts, especially those under stress.Studies in the current dissertation are some of the first to empirically investigate social processes in teams using a novel paradigm and physiological approach. Findings from these studies highlight the importance of emotion in teams in that emotion expression (e.g.: gratitude expression in Chapter 1) and a lack of emotion expression (Chapter 2) would affect both members of a dyadic team, indicating the social consequences of emotion expression and emotion regulation in teams. These studies also provide new insights of when teams work together and individually. Remarkably, this dissertation reports some of the first studies to use physiological measurements, including cardiovascular efficiency and physiological linkage between teammates, to study stress response and coordination between teammates. These findings in dyads add new angles and methods of investigating biological and behavioral consequences of emotion expression and emotion regulation between teammates, which may not easily be assessed otherwise. Taken together, the current dissertation will bring significant advances to the broad field of social psychology, organizational behavior, and medicine. In addition, findings in this dissertation have important implementation on optimizing intra- and interpersonal consequences in teamwork under stress