Chapter 10: Transitions in Action Teams

Sudden transitions in task demands often accompany crisis situations, and much of the existing literature in this area focuses on the effects of rapid workload changes on team member communication, stress, vigilance, and perception. Other work at the team level focuses intently on the effects of single processes in team adaptation. The missing link is the team-level transitions across types of processes. We focus specifically on action teams required to abandon old task routines and quickly adapt to nonroutine situations. We examined three different key process transitions for such teams: the routine-to-incremental transition (e.g., slight deviations from SOPs to accommodate field anomalies), the routine-to-nonroutine transition (e.g., major transitions from SOPs to emergency or battle procedures), and the nonroutine-to-sensemaking transition (e.g., abandoning all learned procedures in order to make sense of a unique situation). The chapter closes with a summary of implications of these process type transitions and recommendations for new training for team leadership in action scenarios.