Organizational Behavior: A Brief Overview and Safety Orientation.

Organizational Behavior (OB) is a discipline of social science that seeks explanations for human behavior in organizations. OB draws on core disciplines such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, communication, and law to create and investigate multilevel explanations of why people engage in particular behaviors, and which behaviors under which circumstances lead to better outcomes in organizations. Created using an applied or pragmatic lens and tested with a wide range of both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, most OB theories and research have direct implications for managers and for other organizational participants. Not surprisingly, one focal area of OB research concerns safety in organizations, and a growing body of safety-oriented literature in OB is based on data collected during simulation training across a variety of organizations such as hospitals, airlines, nuclear power plants, and other high reliability organizations.

Monitoring and talking to the room: autochthonous coordination patterns in team interaction and performance.

This paper builds on and extends theory on team functioning in high-risk environments. We examined 2 implicit coordination behaviors that tend to emerge autochthonously within high-risk teams: team member monitoring and talking to the room. Focusing on nonrandom patterns of behavior, we examined sequential patterns of team member monitoring and talking to the room in higher- and lower-performing action teams working in a high-risk health care environment. Using behavior observation methods, we coded verbal and nonverbal behaviors of 27 anesthesia teams performing an induction of general anesthesia in a natural setting and assessed team performance with a Delphi-validated checklist-based performance measure. Lag sequential analyses revealed that higher-performing teams were characterized by patterns in which team member monitoring was followed by speaking up, providing assistance, and giving instructions and by patterns in which talking to the room was followed by further talking to the room and not followed by instructions. Higher- and lower-performing teams did not differ with respect to the frequency of team member monitoring and talking to the room occurrence. The results illustrate the importance of patterns of autochthonous coordination behaviors and demonstrate that the interaction patterns, as opposed to the behavior frequencies, discriminated higher- from lower-performing teams. Implications for future research and for team training are included. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).

The benefits of flexible team interaction during crises.

Organizations increasingly rely on teams to respond to crises. While research on team effectiveness during nonroutine events is growing, naturalistic studies examining team behaviors during crises are relatively scarce. Furthermore, the relevant literature offers competing theoretical rationales concerning effective team response to crises. In this article, the authors investigate whether high- versus average-performing teams can be distinguished on the basis of the number and complexity of their interaction patterns. Using behavioral observation methodology, the authors coded the discrete verbal and nonverbal behaviors of 14 nuclear power plant control room crews as they responded to a simulated crisis. Pattern detection software revealed systematic differences among crews in their patterns of interaction. Mean comparisons and discriminant function analysis indicated that higher performing crews exhibited fewer, shorter, and less complex interaction patterns. These results illustrate the limitations of standardized response patterns and highlight the importance of team adaptability. Implications for future research and for team training are included.