Team Stress: Grasping Physiological Stress Dynamics in Small Teams Through State Space Grids

Recent studies have come to recognize the benefit of adopting a team-level perspective when studying stress in a team. However, most studies on team stress still rely on traditional scoring methods that provide limited insight into the dynamics that characterize team stress as a temporal and multilevel construct. This article explores how state space grids (SSGs) can identify, track, and visualize physiological stress dynamics over time and between members during a task. We collected electrodermal activity data from nine teams to demonstrate the application of SSGs during a flight simulator task. The results show that SSGs enable researchers to capture and visualize dynamic changes in stress levels and the association between member’s stress levels in teams. SSG analytics illustrate the importance of capturing stress variability over time and between members as, in this sample, teams were most attracted toward a state of shared low–low or high–high states in the grid, while shared and affiliated intermediated states in the middle of the SSGs were often just “passed” through by teams. In the Discussion section, this article elaborated more on how SSGs can lead to more novel and nuanced insights into the nature and impact of stress in teams as well as applied in other contexts.