Navigating team resilience: A video observation of an elite yacht racing crew

Abstract

In this paper, we take a process perspective to inductively theorize how shifting sources of adversity and subjective experiences of team relationship quality influence team resilience across time. Building on the literature, we characterize team resilience as a set of team-level processes—anticipation, coping, and learning—which can support teams to work interdependently to return to, or beyond, pre-adversity levels of performance. Despite the rising interest, existing research has tended to be theoretical or exploratory in relation to sources of everyday team adversity. To further understand team resilience, we examine how the characteristics of team resilience unfold across time between a crew of sailors during a challenging multi-day yacht race and competitive demands. Using video observations and interview data, we explore in real-time how team resilience processes are (i) shaped by dynamism in the sources of external (environmental) adversity and internal team adversity encountered and (ii) influenced by shifts in the subjective experience of team relationship quality across time. We make two contributions: a novel conceptualization of how external (environmental) adversity and internal team adversity affect team resilience processes across time and a theorization of how relationship quality affects team resilience in the context of shifting adversities.