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To better understand contributing factors and mediating mechanisms related to team dynamics in isolated, confined, and extreme (ICE) environments.

Literature review.

Our primary focus is on cohesion and adaptation – two critical aspects of team performance in ICE environments that have received increased attention in both the literature and funding initiatives. We begin by describing the conditions that define ICE environments and review relevant individual biological, neuropsychiatric, and environmental factors that interact with team dynamics. We then outline a unifying team cohesion framework for long-duration missions and discuss several environmental, operational, organizational, and psychosocial factors that can impact team dynamics. Finally, we end with a discussion of directions for future research and countermeasure development, emphasizing the importance of temporal dynamics, multidisciplinary integration, and novel conceptual frameworks for the inherently mixed work and social setting of long-duration missions in ICE environments.

A better understanding of team dynamics over time can contribute to success in a variety of organizational settings, including space exploration, defense and security, business, education, athletics, and social relationships.

We promote a multidisciplinary approach to team dynamics in ICE environments that incorporates dynamic biological, behavioral, psychological, and organizational factors over time.

Understanding how health status and physiological factors affect performance is a daunting task. This chapter will discuss physiological, behavioral, and psychological factors that influence or determine the capacity to fight, and will consider metrics that can be used to measure their status. The premise of this discussion is that there is a set of physiological and psychological factors that intimately affect performance and that the relative contribution of these variables is individually unique. These factors can be identified and assessed, and are amenable to modification. A fuller understanding of these variables can lead the effort to maintain and improve performance in the adverse and challenging environments of military operations.

This chapter addresses the topic of social action in catastrophic situations. The main phenomenon to be explained is how social actors cope and adjust to a sudden and unexpected change in the ecological pressures around them, such as during natural and technological disasters, in war zones, in the aftermath of accidents, and so on.¹ Using interpretative and phenomenological methods (Bentz & Shapiro, 1998), this chapter builds toward a Weberian kind of “ideal type” model outlining key sociological variables that try to explain differential social responses from human beings as they experience catastrophic circumstances.² Human beings must act very differently during catastrophes than they do during normal life. Just why is it that some people just succumb to the elements, whereas others struggle to persevere? How do some social actors manage to rely on their intelligence, resources, skill sets and other assets to control an otherwise hostile environment while others fail to do so?

Human performance, particularly that of the warfighter, has been the subject of a large amount of research during the past few decades. For example, in the Medline database of medical and psychological research, 1,061 papers had been published on the topic of “military performance” as of October 2003. Because warfighters are often pushed to physiological and mental extremes, a study of their performance provides a unique glimpse of the interplay of a wide variety of intrinsic and extrinsic factors on the functioning of the human brain and body. Unfortunately, it has proven very difficult to build performance models that can adequately incorporate the myriad of physiological, medical, social, and cognitive factors that influence behavior in extreme conditions. The chief purpose of this chapter is to provide a neurobiological (neurochemical) framework for building and integrating warfighter performance models in the physiological, medical, social, and cognitive areas. This framework should be relevant to all other professionals who routinely operate in extreme environments. The secondary purpose of this chapter is to recommend various performance metrics that can be linked to specific neurochemical states and can accordingly strengthen and extend the scope of the neurochemical model.

This chapter discusses the role of energy production in the global capitalist economy and its relationship to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with particular focus on SDG 8 – ‘Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all’ – and SDG 12 – ‘Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns’. It achieves this by first introducing the Club of Rome report the Limits to Growth which utilised a system dynamics computer model to simulate the interactions of five global economic subsystems (population, food production, industrial production, pollution and consumption of nonrenewable natural resources) (Meadows, Meadows, Randers, & Behrens III, 1972), the results of which posed serious challenges for global sustainability, to better understand and contextualise unconventional (also referred to as ‘extreme’) and ‘renewable’ energy production as examples of the paradoxical nature of sustainable development in the global capitalist economy. Demonstrating that unconventional energy production methods are much less efficient, more carbon intensive, more environmentally destructive and just as unsustainable, and that renewable energy relies on the extraction of nonrenewable natural resources such as lithium that result in similar environmental and social issues, this chapter will interrogate this and ask the question – is the capitalist system in its current form capable of making ‘sustainable development something more than the oxymoron it appears?’.

This chapter outlines the major analytical efforts performed as part of the overarching research project with the aim to investigate the organizational and environmental circumstances around the extreme negatively skewed performance outcomes regularly observed across firms. It presents the collection and treatment of comprehensive European and North American datasets where subsequent analyses reproduce the contours of performance distributions observed in prior empirical studies. Key theoretical perspectives engaged in prior studies of performance data and the implied risk-return relationships are presented and these point to emerging commonalities between empirical findings in the management and finance fields. The results from extended analyses of more fine-grained data from North American manufacturing firms uncover the subtle effects of leadership and structural features, and computational simulations demonstrate how the implied adaptive processes can lead to the empirically observed performance distributions. Finally, the findings from the analytical project activities are set in context and the implications of the observed results are discussed to reach at a final conclusion.

Japan is characterized by its businesses older than 100 years, commonly known as shinise (老舗) – long-standing companies – which tend to be family businesses. Longevity in Japanese family businesses has been attributed, among other factors, to the system of the ie, or patrilineal household line. This chapter follows a sociocultural perspective and uses documental and media textual analysis to identify the cultural and structural attributes and the strategies that shinise have implemented when facing new and intimidating economic, political, and social circumstances under extreme contexts such as wars, structural changes, and national catastrophes and crises while protecting the family structure behind the firm. It is found that, for these firms, the ie comes first than individuals, and so does talent over lineage. The relevance of someone who shares the values that resonate with those of the business is imperative, but also that the leader has a resilient character and an innovative and proactive mind, and understands that his/her major purpose should be protecting the firm and securing its continuity.

In this chapter, we view team cohesion from a more generalized perspective of team dynamics, and focus on four leadership models for understanding these dynamics in teams in the context of the Mars Mission. Given the long duration of the mission with periods of no or intermittent communication and support, isolation and confinement, and the risk of great physical and psychological harm, having tailored leadership models for this unique team dynamics context is critical. And yet, many of these same dangerous conditions occur in other contexts such as for first responders, crisis management teams, Special Forces operations, and scientific exploration teams in extreme environments. As such, building from a model of leadership and team dynamics for dangerous contexts, for a long-duration space mission involving both Mission Control and the Astronaut Crew, these models of leadership and team dynamics include a collective-level approach for scientists and engineers, a primarily crew-based socioemotional approach, a leader-level crisis/emergency approach, and a dyadic or sortie-level approach. Implications of these models for effective leadership in building and maintaining team dynamics and cohesion for the Mars Mission and across a variety of other dangerous and extreme contexts are discussed.