The diagnosis and measurement of team resilience in sociotechnical systems

This paper presents a novel approach to diagnosing and measuring team resilience in sociotechnical systems. This approach is based on a multi-level model developed to study team phenomena from a general systems perspective. We will describe a methodology that uses a concept similar to flow within the psychological literature to measure a team's response to instances of sub-optimal system function. Team resilience is determined by examining flow disruptions, which are instances of sub-optimal system performance that disrupt normal system flow, and compensatory strategies, which are behaviors enacted by the team in response to the disruption to re-establish overall system flow. Approaching teams embedded in organizations from this perspective allows diagnosis of the systemic influences that contribute most to the variance in performance across entities, identification of pervasive latent systemic failures, and the development of a tailored taxonomy of behavioral teamwork dimensions, which can then be translated into metrics to measure team resilience in many contexts or team configurations.