Physiological compliance and team performance

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2009.02.002 Byline: Amanda N. Elkins (a), Eric R. Muth (a), Adam W. Hoover (b), Alexander D. Walker (a), Thomas L. Carpenter (a), Fred S. Switzer (a) Abstract: Physiological compliance (PC) refers to the correlation between physiological measures of team members over time. The goals of this study were to examine ways of measuring PC in heart rate variability (HRV) data and the relationship between PC and team performance. Teams were tasked with entering both real and simulated rooms and 'shooting' individuals with a weapon and identifying individuals without a weapon. The linear correlation and directional agreement PC methods were shown to be the most sensitive to differences in performance, with greater PC being associated with better performance. The correlation method when applied to a measure of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) revealed a significant difference between high and low performers (t[8]=-2.31, p =0.03) and the directional agreement applied to inter-beat-intervals and RSA revealed trend-level differences (t[4.62]=-1.86, p =0.06 and t[8]=-1.68, p =0.07). These results suggest that PC may have merit for predicting team performance. Author Affiliation: (a) Department of Psychology, Clemson University, 418 Brackett Hall, Clemson, SC 29634-1355, USA (b) Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Clemson University, SC 29634-1355, USA Article History: Received 4 January 2008; Accepted 5 February 2009