Teamwork in an Emergency: How Distributed Leadership Improves Decision Making

During highly stressful, dynamic, and life threatening situations such as an emergency on board an aircraft, decision making is subjected to particularly challenging conditions which increase the potential for errors. Several authors have studied traps for such errors in the cockpit, but to our knowledge so far, nobody has considered the role of the cabin crew, who have to closely collaborate with pilots in these situations. This study investigates decision making and distributed leadership (i.e. leadership functions are carried out by formal & informal leaders depending on situational demands) in 84 cockpit and cabin crews (N=504) during a simulated emergency in the A320 cabin-cockpit flight simulator. Results indicate that distributed leadership plays an important role in decision making and strongly correlates with the quality of the decision and crew performance. In crews who reached the correct decision (N=63) both formal and informal leaders displayed significantly more leadership behavior (M = 4.68, SE =.14, t (82) = 2.88, p < .01) than crews who made a wrong decision (N=21) (M =3.71, SE = .37). Interestingly, the effect of informal leadership, entered as a second factor into the hierarchical regression model, predicted crew performance even more strongly than leadership demonstrated by formal leaders. To conclude, we discuss the implications of those results for decision making in aviation and recommend changes in the design and content of CRM (Crew Resource Management) training which could also be useful for interdisciplinary teams in other high risk areas such as medicine, railway, power plants, policing or fire fighting.