A study conducted by the Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) concludes that the effective adaptation in crisis and emergency situations requires team to accurately understand unfolding events and flexibly use different coordination processes. Paradoxically, the rigid enforcement of crisis protocols can constrain these processes of understanding and coordination, ultimately weakening teams’ adaptive capacity.

The study, published in Organization Science and led by Ramón Rico, Professor of Business Administration at UC3M, explains how team adaptation unfolds under highly disruptive events. The findings highlight the importance of actively processing the emergency context, particularly by identifying discrepancies between what team members expect to occur and what they actually perceive. Detecting and interpreting these mismatches enables teams to effectively combine two key forms of coordination: implicit coordination (based on shared routines and prior expectations) and explicit coordination (grounded in open communication and deliberate planning). “Our research, which integrates field studies of real firefighting teams with experimental simulations in the lab, shows that imposing rigid action protocols limits team's information-processing and reduces their flexibility to switch between different types of coordination,” explains the lead researcher.

The study develops and empirically tests a model that explains how teams adapt to disruptions. The model integrates two central constructs: Task Mental Models (the stable, pre-existing knowledge structures that team members bring to the task) and Team Situation Models (the team’s real-time understanding of the evolving situation). In disruptive contexts, a gap frequently emerges between expectations and actual events. Successfully addressing this discrepancy requires explicit coordination processes—such as redefining responsibilities and actively sharing updated information—in order to protect lives and critical resources. By contrast, rigid protocol enforcement tends to trigger automatic responses that suppress this adaptive recalibration.

The practical implications are significant: “In highly disruptive situations, unquestioned reliance on predefined protocols can become dysfunctional if it prevents teams from integrating new environmental information,” Rico notes. Thus, training strategies, such as perturbation training, can be applied to improve teams' adaptability by introducing controlled disruption (e.g., reducing the number of members or changing task specifications) during simulations or in stable performance situations.

Teams can also be trained to flexibly combine roles and procedural guidelines, enhancing execution under crisis conditions. This approach has recently been implemented in collaboration with La Paz University Hospital in Madrid (Spain), where adaptive leadership training facilitated flexible role redistribution during critical operating room scenarios and demonstrated measurable effects on clinical performance.

This work has involved the collaboration of the Complutense University of Madrid, Maastricht University (The Netherlands), Penn State University, and Pepperdine University (United States of America). It was also partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation [PID2020-113394GB-I00] and the Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences [ARI W911NF-16-1-0545].

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3tqnyiwtTU