Under pressure, does a team still use its resources?
When an incident occurs, personally taking back control of every decision may seem like the safest managerial response. The useful question is more specific: how can managers preserve access to the team's resources without delaying an urgent decision?
What the literature establishes
Barry M. Staw, Lance E. Sandelands and Jane E. Dutton (1981, Administrative Science Quarterly) offer a theoretical synthesis of threat-rigidity effects across several levels of analysis. They describe, in particular, restricted information processing and a constriction of control that may reinforce centralisation. For a team, the risk is therefore not simply running out of time: it is also making less use of resources that remain available.
Stress also changes influence between colleagues
James E. Driskell and Eduardo Salas (1991, Journal of Applied Psychology) experimentally examine group decision making under stress. Their work shows that stress can alter how participants take other people's judgements into account. It therefore invites a distinction between two questions: who holds relevant information, and how much influence that person actually has on the decision.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that a team under pressure should always decentralise its decisions. These studies do not justify that rule: a familiar procedure and clearly identified authority may still be necessary. The important distinction is between responsibility for making the final call and the opportunity for other members to flag something that could change the decision. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot promise
A theoretical synthesis and an experiment are not enough to predict how a team will behave during a real incident. The nature of the threat, familiarity with the situation and regulatory obligations limit transferability. In practice, making a decision faster does not prove that the team is making a better one: the resulting corrections and rework also need to be examined.
A practical check in Berne
As part of SHR's « Performance d'équipe » programme, a scenario exercise can reproduce a situation relevant to Berne: an urgent case in the federal administration, a public health alert, a telecoms outage or a non-conformity in precision manufacturing. Comparing two scenarios of similar difficulty, with and without a brief, structured collection of concerns before the final decision, makes it possible to test a practice without changing mandatory operational procedures. The main measure is the proportion of critical information built into the scenario that is explicitly considered before the decision, recorded alongside decision time and any corrections required. This local test does not demonstrate a general effect, but it makes the central question verifiable: does the team draw on its resources when pressure rises? To go further: explore the Team Performance training in Bern in the canton of Bern, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Team Performance in Bern
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