J. Richard Hackman takes a look at cockpit crews and corporate America

By Eileen K. McCluskey

Special to the Gazette

J. Richard Hackman, Harvard's Cahners-Rabb Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology, wants to know what makes groups work, and what's going on when they fail. Through his research, including studies of more than 300 cockpit crews, Hackman looks for a societal middle ground, where teams of workers "can operate superbly while still allowing for individual growth."

"In all groups, process problems, where individuals are in conflict with one another, are pointed to as the reasons for the teams' failure. But this is incorrect," Hackman said. "Process problems are more often the result of performance problems, not their cause."

Team Work And Cockpit Crews

In the cockpit crew studies, Hackman found that a critical element was how the team was structured and supported. "If the team stays together," Hackman said, "it gets better. And there is no evidence to support the notion that complacency sets in. As long as a team starts out reasonably well, a stable team's performance generally gets better as its lifespan lengthens. On the other hand, a team that starts out doing badly gets worse over time."

Another crucial element helping to determine whether a cockpit crew works or fails, according to Hackman, is the behavior of the team leader at particular times in the team's lifespan. Hackman cited the work of his colleague Robert Ginnett, who researched the cockpit crew formation process. Based on Ginnett's research, Hackman has identified three points at which the crew's captain can have the most dramatic influence on the team's performance.

One point is at the beginning, during the team's formation. "What the captain does in the first few minutes," Hackman explained, "determines the crew's behavior for the rest of its lifespan." Effective captains, Hackman's research showed, used cockpit crew briefings as a time to delineate expectations of crew members' performances and tasks, and to define the team's structure.

The second point at which a captain can strengthen a crew is at the midpoint, such as during a layover on a multiple-day trip, or midway through a transatlantic flight. And the end of the crew's lifespan can be used as a time for members to reflect upon -- and learn from -- what has transpired.

The strength of the cockpit crew is not just a nice idea; when it comes to flight teams, those that function poorly can actually be dangerous. Hackman reported in an article in Airline Pilot (December 1992): "After reviewing analyses of accidents and reportable incidents, Robert Helmreich of the University of Texas has concluded that in the great majority of cases, the aircraft was mechanically capable of flying out of the situation, all crew members were trained and in good health, and yet the crew got itself into trouble. The team, not the aircraft or the individual pilots, is at the root of most accidents and incidents."

When making recommendations to the airlines where their research was done, Hackman and his associates suggested instituting "hard crews." Hard crews are those that are kept together from flight to flight. A model for hard crews was provided by the military Strategic Air Command, or SAC.

Hackman reported that his recommendations to airlines have resulted mainly in "training. Airlines love to train. But in terms of keeping the crews together, our findings have bounced off a steel plate."

Hurdles In Businesses

Airlines are by no means the only companies that can benefit by cultivating cohesive teams of workers, but it seems that corporate America may first need to jump a hurdle of resistance to teams, before potential rewards can be reaped.

For example, in some companies that have attempted to build teams as a means of boosting productivity, Hackman noted that "it's surprisingly common for innovations to be stopped by the parent organizations."

He described the case of a semiconductor manufacturing plant in Utah that became the most profitable plant company-wide because of initiatives implemented by the production manager. Yet headquarters fired the manager and eventually closed the plant. Commented Hackman, "It was said by senior management that the reason they terminated the production manager was that the job satisfaction numbers of the people in that plant showed a slight decline. But espoused reasons like this one raise more questions than they answer."

Hackman noted that a colleague at the Business School, Michael Jensen, has demonstrated that corporations tend to seek a solution "only when a company has eroded away 70 to 80 percent of its value. Then they consider making real changes," he said, and then added, "the other time it's been done was with the SAC, because these were the crews that would have flown the planes that dropped the bombs in the Cold War era." The SAC used hard crews, Hackman said, "because it was important enough to do it right."