Chapter 7: Human ‘Team’ Factors
Going beyond individual astronaut selection. The Organizational Team Index (OTI) and Optimal Team Design (OTI) increase team performance and mission success by as much as 20.8%.
The success of space missions often depends on the effectiveness of the team. While selecting the right individuals to be astronauts is crucial, it’s not enough to ensure mission success. In this chapter, we’ll explore how organizations can optimize team performance using the Organizational Team Index (OTI) and Optimal Team Design (OTD) for space missions. The Organizational Team Index (OTI) is a tool that identifies team functional characteristics that lead to optimal team performance and outcomes. The OTI assesses the team’s organizational structure, culture, and processes, as well as the team members’ skills, personalities, and interactions. Eduardo Diaz, PhD, developed the OTI from peer-reviewed research, which shows that teams with more closely aligned OTI scores have a more cohesive functional characteristic alignment with cognitive and evaluative processes such as intentions, emotions, planning, and perception. This alignment influences team performance and successful outcomes. The research also shows that when a team’s scores are too high, performance drops significantly, suggesting the importance of diversity and avoiding overrepresentation of a single trait or characteristic (analogy: too many Alphas in the room).
The Optimal Team Design (OTD) is a framework developed from the OTI assessment used to design teams that maximize performance and minimize risk. The OTD considers the mission requirements, the team members’ skills and personalities, and the organizational context to create a team that is optimized for success. The OTD can increase team performance and mission success by as much as 20.8%. The OTD involves several steps, including defining the mission requirements, identifying the necessary skills and competencies, analyzing the team members’ personalities and interactions, and designing the team structure and processes. The OTD can predict the day-to-day performance of a team and identify opportunities for team building and training in areas such as trust, confidence, and understanding how roles change when circumstances change. The OTD is applied in research projects that involve gathering and analyzing data from teams working in various challenging environments. The ongoing and continued advancement of the research aims to identify how external forces and environments affect the psychological and physiological performance of teams and how they can adjust to these factors. Diaz’s research projects include Neutral Buoyancy EVA/IVA Operations, Navigation and Task Workload – Subterranean (Isolation / Environmental), Drone-based Navigation, Reconnaissance, and Search, High Task Workload – High Desert (Environmental factors), and High Crew Workload Team Exercises.
Effective team design is essential for the success of space missions. The Organizational Team Index (OTI) and Optimal Team Design (OTD) are powerful tools that can help organizations optimize team performance and increase mission success. By leveraging these tools, organizations can design teams that are aligned with mission requirements and optimized for success, regardless of the challenging environments they may face.