Eduardo Salas, PhD, professor and the Allyn R. and Gladys M. Cline Chair of Psychology at Rice University in Houston, Texas, has studied teamwork for more than 40 years, in the military, health care, aviation, law enforcement, and commerce, and he has developed many of the best practices we have for getting people to work together for a common goal.
Organizations have come to believe that people are more effective working in collectives than alone, but a successful team is no accident. “We know what makes a good team. The challenge is to create one and to maintain its effectiveness,” says Salas.
An industrial/organizational (I/O) psychologist, Salas has studied a number of high-stakes fields, including some where effective teamwork can make the difference between life and death, and he is one of the world’s most influential researchers in the social sciences. He has received both the Gold Medal Award for Impact in Psychology from the American Psychological Foundation, and APA’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Contributions to Psychology. He is also a fellow in APA Division 14 (Society of Industrial/Organizational Psychology) and is a recipient of its Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award and its Distinguished Professional Contributions Award. He also recently received the James McKeen Cattell Award for lifetime contributions to applied psychological research from the Association for Psychological Science, and the John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety Award for Individual Achievement in health care from the National Quality Forum and the Joint Commission.
Salas has written hundreds of papers, dozens of chapters, and a number of books, most recently Teams that Work: The Seven Drivers of Team Effectiveness, with longtime collaborator Scott Tannenbaum, PhD.
“In my 40 years of doing this, I think I’ve written maybe two solo articles,” he says. “It takes a team to study teams.”
Teamwork in health care
In 1999, the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) published To Err Is Human, a call to action to address the nearly 100,000 people who were then estimated to be dying every year as a result of preventable medical error. Research, including work Salas has done, has shown that effective teamwork is associated with better and safer health care. However, medical error remains a significant cause of death in the United States.
Hierarchies in medicine are part of the problem—a nurse who spots a lethal problem does not trump a physician determined to stay on a dangerous course. That structural dilemma is not particular to health care—hierarchies are baked into the military, too—and power differentials within teams are “not going to go away,” Salas says. The solution, he says, is to increase psychological safety for all team members, to assure that they can speak up without fear of reprisal.
Commercial aviation fatalities in the United States fell 95% in the first two decades of the 21st century (although the spadework for reform began well before that). “Aviation had a hook that health care does not have. When the plane goes down, the pilot goes down with it. In health care, the only one who goes down is the patient,” Salas notes to make a point.
When he first started giving talks to the health care industry more than 20 years ago, “they didn’t want to hear what I had to say,” Salas says. Now, though, he says, health care practitioners, and especially industry leaders, are much more receptive.
The principles of teamwork
We all have experience with teamwork, and everyone has ideas about what makes an effective team. Salas says that team members often believe their own situation is exceptional: Oh, that approach might work for pediatrics, but we’re cardiologists!
But the principles of teamwork are remarkably translatable. Salas says, “If you have task interdependence (team members depending on each other to accomplish a task), then everything that the science tells us about teams matters to you.”
The ABCs of teamwork are a set of interrelated competencies—attitudes, behaviors, and cognitive states—deployed in pursuit of a common goal. Effective teams perform well over time, come what may. Their characteristics include a compelling reason to exist; clarity of roles and responsibilities; a good, caring coach; and a climate of psychological safety that assures team members won’t be punished or humiliated if they offer honest opinions or seek help. A team also needs people who have pertinent knowledge, skills, and attributes; effective communication and cooperation; essential team behaviors like the ability to manage conflict; a shared understanding of the goals at hand and how to reach them; and the conditions necessary to succeed, including adequate time and resources.
Team training can help. The most powerful team-training interventions are those that teach efficient coordination strategies and ways to communicate quickly and effectively.
An experience Salas particularly values has been embedding with teams to learn how they function—with helicopter pilots, air traffic controllers, banking research analysts, oil rig workers in the Gulf of Mexico, OR crews, or nurses in a neonatal intensive care unit, “these magnificent professionals who are doing a great job but want to do better. That has been a big motivator for me.”
Teams in space
Salas has been working for a decade on teamwork for “long duration space exploration” (LDSE) to such destinations as the planet Mars. These voyages will put humans in unprecedented conditions in terms of duration, isolation, and lack of space. Just coming home from Mars, once the job is done, will take six months, and if things aren’t going well, astronauts definitely cannot go for a walk to blow off steam.
Salas and others who are working to prepare for spaceflight have come to understand that an individual’s ability to work well with others will outweigh other qualifications when it comes time to choose the astronauts for these missions. Researchers are gathering data on new, high-tech ways for team leaders, and the far-away ground crew, to monitor relationships, cohesion, and performance.
Some earthbound experiences they study either create or take advantage of conditions that affect individuals in the ways LDSE missions will, physically, mentally, and emotionally. These include scientific expeditions to Antarctica and simulations like a 650-square foot habitat at National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in Houston, Texas; the HI-SEAS “analog environment” at the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii; or NASA’s NEEMO undersea research station.
“Our challenge has been, and still is, in collecting robust data” in both field and simulation studies, over time, that will apply to future spaceflight teams, Salas says.
Salas was born and raised in Lima, Peru. His undergraduate degree is in psychology from Florida International University in Miami, and he obtained his master’s degree in I/O psychology at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Then, in part because he spoke Spanish fluently, the United States Navy hired him to help develop an English as a Second Language (ESL) program for Spanish-speaking recruits. That led to further work for the Navy, first in systems development and training evaluation, and eventually in teamwork. He received his PhD in I/O psychology from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.
In 1984, the Navy hired Salas as a civilian research psychologist, to build a team-training laboratory. For 15 years, before pivoting to focus on the private sector, he investigated performance issues with many different types of military teams. “What’s good about the military is that they have a discipline, and one of the biggest motivators: They don’t want to let their buddies down. That’s very powerful,” he says.
