Evidence for the following task (i.e., coordinator, boundary spanner, team leader, evaluator, critic, information provider, team player, and innovator) and social roles (i.e., team builder, nurturer, harmonizer, entertainer, jokester, and the negative roles of attention seeker and negativist) were found. Results of the study speak to the importance of task and social roles within teams that are predominantly intact and operating in extreme environments where mistakes can be life threatening. Critical incidents regarding team interaction were extracted from these source documents and independently coded for team roles by two trained raters. Source documents consist primarily of autobiographies, memoires, biographies, and first-hand accounts of crew interaction during spaceflight. Specifically, we employ the use of retrospective historical data as our input and a historiometric approach ( Simonton, 2003). To begin to understand team roles and how temporal aspects may impact the types of team roles employed when teams are working in extreme mission critical environments, the current manuscript uses a data-driven, bottom-up approach. Additionally, research has been conducted with little attention paid to the importance of temporal factors, despite repeated calls for the importance of considering time in team research (e.g., Mohammed et al., 2009). However, much of this work has been built on ad hoc teams working together for short periods of time under conditions of minimal stress. There is a long history, dating back to the 50 s, which examines the manner in which team roles contribute to effective team performance.

Belbin team roles test public domain