Application Of Effective Command Characteristics During Virtual Ascent

The Everest Simulation challenged our group on a personal and team level to apply effective team characteristics as we virtually scaled Mt. Everest. I was the marathoner role of the team. The team achieved 50% of its goals and I achieved 22% of my personal goals. Team composition and roles were determined by assignment, not voluntary selection. The formally defined roles led to pooled interdependence, instead of a sequential or reciprocal interdependence approach. While we were cohesive in our decision-making process and committed to our team goals, the team yielded mediocre results on a personal and team level due to a few errors in approach in decision-making and common team errors.

The pooled interdependence approach was beneficial for our team, given our cohesion and willingness to assist fellow teammates in tasks, when necessary. As Polzer noted, “high task complexity requires breadth and depth of skills and expertise, and thus multiple people with a diverse set of specialized qualifications are best suited to combine their efforts to perform the work”. While calculating the oxygen tanks in week 6, the task with the highest complexity, groupthink, and the cascade effect clouded our decision-making process and we underestimated oxygen levels for our final ascent to the peak. After an initial calculation was done by a teammate and it was communicated, the decision-making process lacked an independent check or recalculation, and instead, all of us trusted the calculation to our personal and team detriment.

Our daily meetings in the simulation were professional, without conflict or display of emotions, but we lacked key communication of our specialized information from our daily memos. Polzer would have predicted such an outcome as he wrote, “studies have shown that such uniquely-held information typically either does not get communicated to the team or, when it is communicated, is not given adequate consideration, even when it is valid and important”. I attribute the lack of communicated information to teammates making assumptions on the breadth of information available to all teammates, or teammates being too siloed into our specific roles to realize how our roles could impact team-wide decisions.

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The decision-making process was also affected by our leader who prioritized certain personal goals as team-wide goals which limited the team in key areas. Throughout the simulation, our team operated under the presumption that it was beneficial to ascend or stay together on the mountain as a team, and not split apart. In reality, this was merely a personal goal for the leader. Sunstein and Hastie warned of this when they wrote “leaders often promote self-censorship by expressing their own views early, thus discouraging disagreement”. As I synthesized the data from all teams, I noticed unique and similar trends in comparison.

Other teams did not move together as frequently as us. Our leader pushed this as a must, even though it was a mere 1-point personal goal for her and was actually a detriment to other personal and group goals. Additionally, no other team had such a devastating resource error as us. At base camp, I was given our only gamow bag which proved to be a costly error given that two teammates needed to be rescued before reaching the summit as a result of AMS, a total tied for second most in the class. We tied for the least used resources overall. Our resource misuse and oxygen calculation error led to only two teammates reaching the summit - the second-lowest number in the class.

Our team was not alone in our occasional ineffective decision-making. The marathoner on team 1 also was given the gamow bag early in the ascent and was given a lesser effective medication (Acetazolamide) at camp 4. Similar to our group the Acetazolamide was not sufficient in the ascent beyond camp 4 and the marathoner also needed to be rescued. Overall, our goal had the second lowest total of percent goals accomplished and second lowest percentage group goals accomplished. Our teamwork survey results were unsurprisingly positive, however. Similar to all other teams, the survey results reinforced that everyone was pleased with the perceived effectiveness and fairness of our decision-making processes, and enjoyed working with each other. I simply think our team fell victim to groupthink and lack of communication in key areas of the simulation.

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