PS451 Unit 9 Team Performance Paper Example

"Stand Clear" Means Nothing Without an Answer: A PS451 Unit 9 Team Performance Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS451: Selection and Assessment in Organizations

Unit 9 Team Performance Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the tree care company, the crews and every figure are composite and illustrative; the sources cited are real.

The Incident

Last August, a removal crew of four was taking down a dead oak beside a house. The climber, forty feet up, called a warning before dropping a limb. A new ground worker, three weeks on the job, was dragging brush toward the chipper with ear protection in and did not hear it. Two experienced ground workers were standing at the edge of the drop zone and assumed he had heard. Nobody answered the call. The climber, seeing no one directly below, let the limb go. It bounced off a lower branch and struck the new ground worker's shoulder. He spent a night in the hospital and did not come back.

The incident review blamed the new ground worker for being in the drop zone. When I interviewed the crew, a different picture emerged. Each person had done roughly what they always did. The climber always called warnings and rarely waited for an answer. The experienced ground workers knew to watch for each other but had never been told it was their job to watch for new people. The crew had been assembled that morning from two other crews because of absences, and the foreman had not held a briefing because the job seemed routine.

A Team Problem

Tree work is team work. A climber cannot see everything below; ground workers cannot see what is about to fall. Safety depends on a loop of communication: a call from above, an answer from below, and a pause until the answer comes. On our crews, that loop had decayed into a one-way call. And because crews were reassembled almost daily to cover absences, people rarely knew one another's habits.

The climber called the warning, the ground workers knew the rule and the injury happened anyway, because the crew had no shared way of closing the loop.

Does Team Training Work?

Salas et al. (2008) analyzed studies of training aimed at teams rather than individuals. Training whole teams produced moderate gains in four areas: shared knowledge, attitudes toward teammates, teamwork processes and results. Effects depended partly on what the training targeted, whether task skills, teamwork skills or both, and on team characteristics such as how stable the membership was.

Our training had always been individual: climbers learned climbing, ground workers learned the chipper. Nobody had trained as a crew. The program we built has three parts.

Part One: A Closed-Loop Protocol

Every crew now uses the same call-and-response for every drop. The climber calls "Stand clear." Each ground worker in the area answers "Clear" only after checking that they and anyone near them are out of the zone. The climber does not release anything until every ground worker on the job has answered. If anyone is not sure, the answer is "Hold," and the climber waits. New hires wear a high-visibility vest of a different color for their first sixty days so that everyone knows who might not know the routine.

Every crew practiced the protocol on our training tree, with rope-lowered practice limbs, until it became automatic, including runs where an instructor deliberately sent someone into the drop zone without a word.

Part Two: Stable Core Crews

Where possible, crews now keep the same climber and lead ground worker for at least a season. A float pool of three experienced ground workers covers absences, rather than splitting other crews. When a crew does include someone unfamiliar, the morning briefing names that person and assigns an experienced ground worker to watch for them.

Part Three: Briefings and Debriefs

Each job now begins with a five-minute tailgate briefing: the tree's hazards, the drop zone, who answers calls and who leads in a rescue. Each job ends with a three-minute debrief: what went well, what went wrong and one thing to do differently tomorrow.

Tannenbaum and Cerasoli (2013) analyzed studies of debriefs, also called after-action reviews. A structured look back after the work lifted effectiveness by roughly 25 percent over groups that skipped it, an effect size near 0.67. The effect was similar for teams and individuals and in simulated and real settings. That is a large return for three minutes at the truck.

Making It Safe to Speak

Debriefs only work if people say what went wrong. On our crews, ground workers rarely corrected climbers, who are paid more and are treated as senior. Edmondson (1999) followed several dozen teams inside one manufacturer. Where members believed they could own up to a mistake or ask for help without being punished, members spoke up, tried things and talked over results more often, and the teams that did so got better results.

To build that safety, foremen were asked to open each debrief by naming something they themselves could have done better. The climbers who helped design the protocol agreed to model answering "Hold" and stopping work. In the first month, a ground worker called "Hold" on a senior climber twice in one day; both times the climber waited and thanked him at the debrief. Word of that spread quickly.

Results After Four Months

Near-miss reports involving the drop zone rose from two in the four months before the program to eleven in the four months after. That rise is a good sign: crews are noticing and reporting what used to go unremarked. Struck-by injuries fell from three in the previous year to none so far. In a short survey, the share of ground workers who agreed that they could stop a climber without consequences rose from 41 percent to 78 percent.

Limits

Four months is short, and struck-by injuries are rare enough that a few months without one proves little. Near-miss reporting may rise and then fall as the novelty fades. Stable crews are not always possible during storm season, when every crew is stretched. The float pool also depends on three people who may not stay, and losing even one would push us back toward splitting crews to cover absences.

Conclusion

The ground worker was struck because the crew had no shared way to close the communication loop. Salas and colleagues show that team training improves how teams work, Tannenbaum and Cerasoli show that brief debriefs produce real gains, and Edmondson explains why people must feel safe to speak up for teams to learn. A closed-loop call, stable crews, briefings and debriefs have changed how crews work together under the trees.

References

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Salas, E., DiazGranados, D., Klein, C., Burke, C. S., Stagl, K. C., Goodwin, G. F., & Halpin, S. M. (2008). Does team training improve team performance? A meta-analysis. Human Factors, 50(6), 903-933. https://doi.org/10.1518/001872008X375009

Tannenbaum, S. I., & Cerasoli, C. P. (2013). Do team and individual debriefs enhance performance? A meta-analysis. Human Factors, 55(1), 231-245. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018720812448394