task environment role

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Task Environment - Definition, Factors & Example

What is task environment.

Task Environment of an organization is the environment which directly affects the organization from attaining business goals. In brief, Task Environment is the set of conditions originating from suppliers, distributors, customers, stock markets and competitors which directly affects the organization from achieving its goals. 

Suppliers, distributors, customers, competitors all form part of the entire ecosystem in which an organization operates. Every business needs the other business to make sure that the best product is created for the customer meeting the needs and also earns profit. These interdependent conditions form the task environment.

Task environment helps in identifying the environmental factors responsible for the success of the company or a product.

Factors with Examples for Task Environment

Competitors generally look for higher margins and for this they provide unique features to its products, thus try to create differentiation.

Example : Adidas, Nike, Puma all shoe manufacturers produce shoes catering for different segments in different styles and charge premium accordingly.

Organizations also compete for customers as well as for wholesalers, retailers etc. Customers decide the fate of any company and hence companies try their level best to lure them.

Example : Customers might start looking for some other alternative due to shift in consumer behavior like moving from conventional vehicles to electric vehicles. The shift might have been caused by the competitors.

Suppliers have high bargaining power if the raw materials being supplied are rare or if there are less number of suppliers in the market. So it’s important to hold on the suppliers and maintain good relationship with them. Acting intelligently, companies often maintain more number of suppliers to reduce risk of deserting by anyone.

Example : Kriti Nutrients Ltd. in India is supplier of lecithin to Nestle (for baby foods)

Distributors

Distributors who become intermediary between retailers and wholesalers or between manufacturer and wholesaler play a vital role in a task environment.

Example : In case of CPG products, distributors are the most important players in terms of increasing reach of a product across markets, customers and channels.

Hence, this concludes the definition of Task Environment along with its overview.

This article has been researched & authored by the Business Concepts Team . It has been reviewed & published by the MBA Skool Team. The content on MBA Skool has been created for educational & academic purpose only.

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4.4 The Internal Organization and External Environments

• Explain how organizations organize to meet external market threats and opportunities.

At a basic level of understanding how internal organizations respond to environments, consider the theory of Open Systems, which the organizational theorists Katz and Kahn 35 and Bertalanffy introduced. 36

Exhibit 4.15 illustrates this theory’s view of organizations as open systems that take in resources and raw materials at the “input” phase from the environment in a number of forms, depending on the nature of the organization, industry, and its business. Whatever the input resource, (information, raw materials, students entering a university), those resources will be transformed by the internal processes of the organization. The internal organizational systems then process and transform the input material, which is called “through-put” phase, and move the changed material (resources) to the “outputs” and back into the environment as products, services, graduates, etc.

The open systems model serves as a feedback loop continually taking in resources from the environment, processing and transforming them into outputs that are returned to the environment. This model explains organizational survival that emphasizes long-term goals.

Organizations according to this theory are considered as either Open or Closed systems, (or relatively opened or closed) depending on the organization’s sensitivity to the environment. Closed systems are less sensitive to environmental resources and possibilities, and open systems are more responsive and adaptive to environmental changes. For example, during the 1980’s the then Big 3 U.S. auto manufacturers (Ford, General Motors and Chrysler) were pressured by Japanese auto manufacturers’ successful 4-cylinder car sales that hit the U.S. like a shock wave. The Detroit producers experienced slumping sales, plant closures, and employee lay-offs in response to the Japanese wave of competition. It seemed that the U.S. auto makers had become closed or at least insensitive to changing trends in cars during that time and were unwilling to change manufacturing processes. Similarly, Amazon’s business model, discussed earlier, has and continues to pressure retailers to innovate and change processes and practices to compete in this digital era.

Organizations respond to external environments not only through their structures, but also by the domains they choose and the internal dimensions and capabilities they select. An organization defines itself and its niche in an environment by the choice of its domain , i.e., what sector or field of the environment it will use its technology, products, and services to compete in and serve. Some of the major sectors of a task environment include marketing, technology, government, financial resources, and human resources.

Presently, several environmental domains that once were considered stable have become more complex and unstable—e.g., toys, public utilities, the U.S. Postal Service, and higher education. And even domains are changing. For example, as referred to earlier, the traditionally stable and somewhat unchanging domain of higher education has become more complex with the entry of for-profit educational institutions, MOOCs (massive open online courses), internal company “universities,” and other certification and degree programs outside traditional private institutions. Sharing-economy companies such as Uber and Airbnb have redefined the transportation domain in which taxis operate and the hospitality domain in which hotels and bed and breakfasts serve. New business models that use mobile phones, ICTs (information communication technologies), and apps remove middle management layers in traditional organizations and structures.

With a chosen domain in which to operate, owners and leaders must organize internal dimensions to compete in and serve their markets. For example, hierarchies of authority and chain of command are used by owners and top-level leaders to develop and implement strategic and enterprise decisions; managers are required to provide technologies, training, accounting, legal, and other infrastructure resources; and cultures still count to establish and maintain norms, relationships, legal and ethical practices, and the reputation of organizations.

Exhibit 4.16 shows internal organizational dimensions. These dimensions and systems include leadership, strategy, culture, management, goals, marketing, operations, and structure. Relationships, norms, and politics are also included in the informal organization. There are other internal functions not listed here, such as research and development, accounting and finance, production, and human resources. Another popular depiction of internal organizational dimensions is the McKinsey 7-S model , shown in Exhibit 4.17 . Similarly, strategy, structure, systems, skills, staff , and style all revolve around and are interconnected with shared values (or culture) in an organization.

A unifying framework shown in Exhibit 4.18 , developed by Arie Lewin and Carroll Stephens, 37 illustrates the integration of internal organizational dimensions and how these work in practice to align with the external environment. Note that it is the CEO and other top-level leaders who scan the external environment to identify uncertainties and resources before using a SWOT analysis (identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) to confirm and update the domain of an organization and then to define the vision, mission, goals, and strategies. Once the enterprise goals and strategies are developed, the organizational culture, structure, and other systems and policies can be established (human resources, technologies, accounting and finance, and so on).

As Exhibit 4.18 shows, after a CEO and the top-level team identify opportunities and threats in the environment, they then determine the domain and purpose of the organization from which strategies, organizational capabilities, resources, and management systems must be mobilized to support the enterprise’s purpose. 38 The company McDonald’s has, for example, successfully aligned its enterprise with the global environments it serves, which is “1% of the world’s population—more than 70 million customers—every day and in virtually every country across the world.” The major operating goal of the firm driving its internal alignment is a “fanatical attention to the design and management of scalable processes, routines, and a working culture by which simple, stand-alone, and standardized products are sold globally at a predictable, and therefore manageable, volume, quality, and cost.” 39 A more detailed SWOT analysis of McDonald’s operations can be found in endnote.

In practice, no internal organizational alignment with its external environment is perfect or permanent. Quite the opposite. Companies and organizations change leadership and strategies and make structural and systems changes to meet changing competition, market forces, and customers and end users’ needs and demands. Even Amazon continues to develop, expand, and change. With a mission statement as bold and broad as Amazon’s, change is a constant: “Our vision is to be earth’s most customer-centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online” (Amazon.com, Apr 15, 2018).

Amazon has a functional organizational structure that focuses on business functions for determining the interactions among the different parts of the company. Amazon’s corporate structure is best characterized as global function-based groups (most significant feature), a global hierarchy, and geographic divisions, as Exhibit 4.20 shows. This structure seems to fit with the size of Amazon’s business—43% of 2016 retail sales were in the United States. 40 Seven segments, including information technology, human resources and legal operations, and heads of segments, report to Amazon’s CEO. “Senior management team include two CEOs, three Senior Vice Presidents and one Worldwide Controller, who are responsible for various vital aspects of the business reporting directly to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.” 41 The strategic goal underlying this structure is to facilitate Amazon.com to successfully implement e-commerce operations management throughout the entire organization. 42

Despite the company’s exponential growth and success to date, as noted earlier in the section on organizational structures, a disadvantage of structures such as Amazon’s, and in this case Amazon’s, is that it has limited flexibility and responsiveness even with its current growth. “The dominance of the global function-based groups and global hierarchy characteristics reduces the capacity of Amazon to rapidly respond to new issues and problems encountered in the e-commerce business.” 43 Still, Amazon’s most outstanding success factor remains its CEO, Jeff Bezos—his ingenuity, vision and foresight, and ability to sustain and even extend the company’s competitive advantages. Amazon customers value these factors—customer purchase criteria (CPC) that include price, fast delivery, and reliable service. “Consumers choose Amazon because it does better than its competition on these CPC.” 44

Concept Check

• Identify the six major organizational structures.
• Explain the McKinsey 7-S model.

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A Bottom Up Perspective to Understanding the Dynamics of Team Roles in Mission Critical Teams

C. shawn burke.

1 The Institute for Simulation and Training, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, United States

Eleni Georganta

2 Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany

Shannon Marlow

3 Department of Management, The University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, United States

There is a long history, dating back to the 50 s, which examines the manner in which team roles contribute to effective team performance. However, much of this work has been built on ad hoc teams working together for short periods of time under conditions of minimal stress. 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 ). 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. Specifically, we employ the use of retrospective historical data as our input and a historiometric approach ( Simonton, 2003 ). Source documents consist primarily of autobiographies, memoires, biographies, and first-hand accounts of crew interaction during spaceflight. Critical incidents regarding team interaction were extracted from these source documents and independently coded for team roles by two trained raters. 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. 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. While it is often task roles that receive the greatest attention, results point to the importance of not neglecting the socioemotional health of the team (and the corresponding roles). Results also indicated that while some roles were consistently enacted independent of temporal considerations (e.g., mission length), the degree to which others were enacted varied across missions of differing lengths. Additionally, based on the current sample we see the following trends: (1) increased enactment of the team builder role as mission duration increases, (2) prominence of the entertainer role, and (3) increased emphasis on the visionary/problem solver role on missions over 2 years.

Introduction

It has often been said that a team of experts does not make an expert team. Although different conceptualizations of teams have been introduced within the literature, one prevalent definition stipulates that teams consist of two or more individuals who interact dynamically, adaptively, and interdependently; share common goals or purposes; and have specific roles or functions to perform ( Salas et al., 1992 ). Teams represent a prevalent approach to structuring work, with a majority of employees reporting spending at least some part of their day within a team setting ( Ken Blanchard Companies, 2006 ). In this vein, there is a long history of research that has sought to examine the factors that contribute to team effectiveness within a variety of contexts and much has been learned ( Mathieu et al., 2008 ).

Despite the long history of research on team effectiveness, much of this work has been built on ad hoc teams working together for short periods of time within laboratory or organizational settings. Additionally, much of this work is primarily static in nature despite repeated arguments for the importance of considering temporal factors in team research (e.g., Mohammed et al., 2009 ). This, in turn, has led to minimal guidance for those individuals tasked with staffing, developing, and assessing teams that operate over longer periods of time as intact teams or operate within mission critical, extreme contexts. Teams that operate in these environments are often referred to as “extreme teams.” According to Bell et al. (2018) , extreme teams are those which are embedded in environments whereby one or more contextual features exist that are atypical in level or kind.

While understanding the factors that facilitate team effectiveness and how these may change over time is an important and difficult endeavor due to the complexity of collecting longitudinal data on teams, facilitating this understanding is of even greater importance for teams operating in extreme contexts. Extreme teams are not only exposed to stressors that are atypical in level, but stressors often occur simultaneously and oscillate between chronic and acute duration levels ( Bell et al., 2018 ). Teams operating under these conditions have been shown to be more likely to have decrements in performance due to the effects of stress on team process (and correspondingly performance, Driskell et al., 1999 ).

In seeking to understand the factors that facilitate the effectiveness of such teams and how these factors may change based on temporal factors (e.g., team duration), we focus on team roles. Research on team roles has a rich history dating back to Bales (1950) . Roles have been defined as a “set of behaviors that are interrelated with the repetitive activities of others and characteristic of the person in a particular setting” ( Stewart et al., 2005 , p. 344). Throughout the years, many taxonomies have been created to delineate the roles that facilitate performance in teams (e.g., Bales, 1950 ; Belbin, 1981 ; Mumford et al., 2006 ). While there are differences in the taxonomies created throughout the years, nearly all argue for the importance of both task and social roles. However, not much is known regarding the types of team roles needed within mission critical, extreme contexts, or how team roles in this context vary based on temporal factors (e.g., team/mission duration).

Therefore, the goal of the current study is to move the literature forward in two thrusts: (1) understanding the team roles needed within extreme environments and (2) examining how the instrumentality of specific team roles may vary based on temporal factors in extreme environments. These advancements meet a critical need in better understanding the dynamic nature of teams and consequently the roles that are enacted, but also begin to highlight the importance of context.

To achieve our goals, we employ historiometry ( Simonton, 2003 ) as a methodology to analyze archival documentation of crew interaction, with a particular emphasis on role enactment in extreme teams using spaceflight crews as an exemplar. In the following, we first present background on team roles, extreme teams, and highlight a set of hypotheses that serve to drive our approach. Next, we summarize our methodology including the nature of our sample and procedure. Finally, we describe our results, extract the implications for understanding the dynamic nature of team roles within the context of extreme teams, and highlight future research needs.

Team roles have been defined as different functions and responsibilities team members must assume to enable smooth team functioning ( Stewart et al., 1999 , 2005 ). In this vein, a number of taxonomies have been created that argue for those roles that must be enacted to facilitate team performance ( Benne and Sheats, 1948 ; Belbin, 1993 ; Mathieu et al., 2015 ; Driskell et al., 2017 ). The manner in which taxonomies have described team roles has varied, ranging from descriptions involving: (1) high overarching categories consisting of 2–3 dimensions, (2) nuanced categories consisting of 5–12 dimensions, and (3) those focusing on a set of core characteristics (see Table 1 for exemplars). Early work tended to describe team roles primarily in terms of broad overarching roles (e.g., Bales, 1950 ). Evidence of this research stream can still be seen in work on team roles for despite many role taxonomies becoming more nuanced, there is now general agreement on two broad classes of team roles: task roles (those behaviors that further task completion and fulfillment of the team’s objectives) and social roles (those behaviors that maintain the team’s social environment and the socioemotional health of the team).

Example team role taxonomies.

As the literature progressed, taxonomies began to become more nuanced, accounting for a more varied set of roles (e.g., Margerison and McCann, 1985 ; Belbin, 1993 ; Parker, 1994 , 1996 ; DuBrin, 1995 ). Perhaps most recent in this steam of work are role taxonomies put forth by Mumford et al. (2006) and Mathieu et al. (2015) . Mumford et al. (2006) synthesized the previous literature on roles and delineated a set of ten roles, five task roles (i.e., contractor, creator, contributor, completer, critic) and five social roles (i.e., communicator, cooperator, calibrator, consul, coordinator, see Table 1 ). Mathieu et al. (2015) suggest that one of the key theoretical contributions of this work is integrating Ancona and Caldwell’s (1988 , 1992 ) work on roles with additional theoretical frameworks to include the notion of boundary spanning. Work by Mathieu et al. (2015) attempted to find a middle ground between high overarching taxonomies of team roles and those taxonomies with many nuanced team roles. Mathieu et al. (2015) proposed and validated the Team Role Experience and Orientation (TREO), that includes six team roles. The six roles consist of the organizer (i.e., structures the team and task to ensure goals are being met), doer (i.e., completes taskwork), challenger (i.e., challenges the team to question assumptions and approaches to the task), innovator (i.e., generates ideas and solutions), team builder (i.e., maintains a positive atmosphere within the team, establishes norms, and supports team decisions), and connector (i.e., connects the team with outside entities). Taken as a whole, the research provides compelling evidence to support the validity of the six roles introduced within this theoretical framework.

Representing the last category of role taxonomies is the work of Driskell et al. (2017) . Building upon previous work, Driskell et al. (2017) delve deeper into roles and argue that there are three characteristics (i.e., dominance, sociability, task orientation, see Table 1 ) that can be used to describe all team roles based on the degree to which each characteristic is present. This three-dimensional model is labeled TRIAD or Tracking Roles in and Across Domains. Its usefulness lies in helping to understand how team roles might covary with one another based on their underlying characteristics.

Each of these approaches has expanded an understanding of the team roles needed for successful teamwork. However, there remains a gap in the literature regarding the influence of context. Researchers have sought to create team role taxonomies that are comprehensive and generalize across samples and conditions. Yet, we suggest that the prevalence and necessity of team roles may be contingent upon the demands of the situation. Therefore, we draw from a taxonomy introduced to describe team roles in extreme environments to further understanding in this area. In particular, Burke et al. (2016) developed a taxonomy which utilized existing literature and interviews with domain experts to form an initial set of team roles grounded in the context of teams operating in extreme environments. The taxonomy depicts a set of eleven roles consisting of five social roles (three functional, two dysfunctional) and six functional task roles. Social roles include: contribution seeker, team builder, jokester/entertainer, attention seeker, and negativist. In contrast, task roles consist of the following: team player, evaluator, information provider, boundary spanner, visionary/innovator, coordinator (see Table 2 for a full description of roles).

Team role taxonomy ( Burke et al., 2016 ).

While the taxonomy put forth by Burke et al. (2016) provides initial input into the types of team roles that may appear, further research needs to be conducted to examine the degree to which these roles actually occur in teams operating in extreme contexts. Teams embedded within extreme environments are repeatedly faced with strong situations which present unique demands, and each demand may require a different team role. Consequently, a more precise theoretical model explicating the roles needed for success, depending upon the various demands of the situation, is required. To address this gap, we leverage the taxonomy described by Burke et al. (2016) along with the literature on extreme teams (below) to foster our understanding of how different conditions faced by spaceflight teams influence the necessity of specific team roles.

Role Enactment in Extreme Teams

As the predominant amount of work on team roles has been conducted within the context of teams operating in non-extreme environments, those charged with composing, managing, or developing teams that operate in extreme environments have little guidance upon which to rely; this is despite the mission critical nature of the teams that operate within these types of environments. Extreme environments have been described as ones in which “one or more extreme events are occurring or are likely to occur that may exceed the organization’s capacity to prevent and result in an extensive and intolerable magnitude of physical, psychological, or material consequences to – or in close physical or psycho-social proximity to – organization members” ( Hannah et al., 2009 , p. 898). Teams that operate within extreme environments often face stressors that are atypical in kind or level ( Bell et al., 2018 ); this culmination of stressors may drive the instrumentality of the various task and social roles that have been argued for within the broader literature.

While there are a number of team types that operate in extreme environments, perhaps the most commonly referenced are those operating within the context of polar exploration, firefighting, spaceflight, and some military environments. In investigating role enactment within these more extreme teams, we utilize teams involved in space exploration/spaceflight. Teams operating within the context of spaceflight face a number of potential stressors that are atypical in terms of kind and level. For example, research has identified at least four different classes of stressors often present in this environment: physiological/physical, habitability, taskwork, and psychosocial (see Dietz et al., 2017 ). In terms of physiological/physical stressors the following have been identified: decreased exposure to sunlight, circadian rhythm disruption, and sleep deprivation. Stressors related to habitability have been argued to include things such as a lack of privacy, noise/vibrations, and cooking/eating restrictions. Crews also face task related stressors such as: scheduling, variations in task autonomy, periods of monotomy/boredom, shiftwork, time pressure, and high workload. Finally, there are a myriad of psychosocial stressors which may occur, including but not limited to family life disruption, multicultural issues, task and relationship conflict, communication delays, and isolation/confinement ( Dietz et al., 2017 ). These stressors often occur in conjunction with one another and serve as a source of threat to the crews embedded within this environment. As such, space exploration, and the teams therein, provide an exemplar of teams that operate in extreme environments and can be categorized along the set of characteristics argued by Hannah et al. (2009) to define extreme environments (i.e., location in time, magnitude of consequences, probability of consequences, physical/psychosocial proximity, and form of threat).

In seeking to understand the team roles that must be enacted within extreme environments, such as spaceflight, we can leverage work conducted on how teams respond when under stress. In this vein, early work by Sorokin (1943) found that groups involved in catastrophic events tended to become overly aroused and emotional which consequently impacted the way they processed information and made decisions. Similarly, work conducted by Driskell and Salas (1991) found stress impacts the degree to which members are receptive to informaton offered by team members. Specifically, replicating previous findings ( Foushee and Helmreich, 1988 ), Driskell and Salas (1991) found that under stress low status members became more willing to defer to high status members. However, contrary to previous findings, results indicated that high status members were more likely to attend to the task contributions of others. In these cases the team is in a situation in which the high status member is willing to accept task input, yet lower status members may be less willing to provide such input. This drives a need for task related roles which seek to proactively elicit information from relevant team members. While this role primarily serves to facilitate task accomplishment, it does have a social component by providing a sense of meaning and value to team members indicating that their contributions are valued.

Extending this work are findings by researchers indicating that stress leads to a loss of team perspective whereby an individual member’s breadth of attention narrows and they become more self-focused, less group identity is reported, and members have less of a collective representation of the task ( Driskell et al., 1999 ). Similarly, stress has been argued to increase distraction and decrease attentional focus, increase team members’ cognitive load, increase negative emotion (e.g., frustration, fear, anxiety), and increase social impairment (e.g., reduce back-up behavior, increased interpersonal conflict/aggression, failure to appropriately read social cues, and less cooperative behavior as seen through attentional narrowing) ( Driskell et al., 2018 ). Given the impact that stress has on both task and psychosocial aspects of the team, in line with prior research, we would expect that both task and social roles would be present ( Prichard and Stanton, 1999 ; Chong, 2007 ) and fairly equally distributed when looked at across the lifecycle of the team.

• simple  Hypothesis 1: The distribution of task and social roles will be fairly equally represented in extreme teams.

The taxonomy put forth by Hannah et al. (2009) along with the types of stressors often experienced within spaceflight can be used to further make predictions regarding the specific types of task and social role behaviors that might be evidenced. Hannah et al. (2009) delineates five dimensions of extreme environments: location in time/temporal ordering, magnitude of consequences, probability of consequences, form of threat, and physical or psychosocial proximity. For the current effort, the first four of these are perhaps the most relevant in delineating the types of roles needed within the context of spaceflight (and other teams operating in similar extreme contexts). As such, these will be briefly discussed next.

Location in Time

The types of threat that are present within the predominant number of extreme environments are ones which oscillate over time (e.g., at certain times being more of a concern). The temporal cycle of the impact of such threats will vary across extreme contexts and as such will drive the nature of the type of team processes required for teams to be resilient within such environments. With regard to spaceflight, the threat is primarily located in the situation although some physiological effects can persist beyond the immediate situation. While there are always low intensity chronic stressors that exist within spaceflight due to the mission criticality of the environment and distance of the crew from earth, there are periods of high intensity, acute stressors which may occur in combination as unexpected or off-nominal events occur. In this vein, Hannah et al. (2009) argue for the importance of the management of transitions between these periods of nominal and off-nominal events. With regard to roles, this drives the need for the sets of behavioral activities which will facilitate team and leader transition phase behaviors as seen in the work of Marks et al. (2001) and Morgeson et al. (2010) . More specifically, role behaviors that facilitate structuring and planning of coordinative activities and points of transition, such that member cognitive and behavioral capacities are taken into account in order to ensure the capacity of any one individual member is not exceeded. This would, in turn, point to the importance of the coordinator role, information provider which serves to facilitate the exchange and clarification of information, boundary spanner to push and pull information in from outside the immediate team for use in planning, as well as the enactment of the evaluator role.

Magnitude/Probability of Consequences

The second and third factors that Hannah et al. (2009) argue as defining characteristics of extreme environments are the magnitude and probability of consequences. With respect to spaceflight, the magnitude and probability of consequences is high given the distance from earth, relative isolation, and the environmental characteristics of space. To better understand the impact on the crew and the roles that may be important, we leverage existing literature on the impact of stress on teams along with that on high reliability organizations. Extracting from the literature on stress and teams, stress has been shown to degrade team process by causing: a narrowing of attention, loss of team perspective, degradations in coordination, and tendency for groupthink with low status members more willing to defer to others and less likely to speak up (e.g., Janis, 1972 ; Callaway et al., 1985 ; Driskell and Salas, 1991 ; Burke et al., 2008 ; Ellis and Pearsall, 2011 ). This points to team roles such as the critic (to combat groupthink) and boundary spanner (to bring in alternative information from outside and serving to combat the narrowing of attention and in combination with the critic role serving to combat groupthink). The propensity for low status members to “go with the flow” and potentially not offer valuable information drives the need for the contribution seeker.

High reliability organizations (HROs) can be defined as organizations that operate within environments where the magnitude and probability of consequence of error is high, yet are able to minimize errors ( Roberts, 1990 ). As such, HROs should provide some insight into the types of roles needed when magnitude and probability of consequence is high. Research has suggested that principles of collective mindfulness (i.e., preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify interpretations, sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience, and underspecification of structures, Weick et al., 1999 ) are the mechanisms that allow HROs to effectively operate. Moreover, work has attempted to translate the above organizational practices to the team level (e.g., Wilson et al., 2005 ; Baker et al., 2006 ). Wilson et al. (2005) argue that at the team level, these processes may be manifested through the following actions: sensitivity to operations (e.g., cross-lagged communication, information exchange, maintaining shared situation awareness), commitment to resilience (e.g., backup/monitoring, shared mental models), deference to expertise (e.g., assertiveness, collective orientation, expertise), reluctance to simplify (e.g., adaptability, flexibility, and planning), and preoccupation with failure (e.g., error management, feedback/team self-correction).

An examination of the HRO principles can provide insight into the types of team roles needed. For example, many of the principles speak to ensuring that information is being transmitted throughout the team (i.e., sensitivity to operations, preoccupation with failure) to maintain shared mental models and situation awareness (i.e., sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience). This speaks to the need for team roles such as the information provider and contribution seeker to ensure relevant input is being gained no matter the status of the individual team member. The importance of members backing one another up (i.e., commitment to resilience) and maintaining a collective orientation (i.e., deference to expertise) drives the need for the team player, jumping in wherever needed. Finally, the requirement to be adaptive and flexible (i.e., reluctance to simplify, preoccupation with failure) drives the need of the critic who can combat against groupthink as well as the boundary spanner role to ensure that the team is maintaining an awareness of events outside the team that may impact their mission.

• simple  Hypothesis 2: The oscillations in stressor onset as well as the high magnitude and probability of consequences will drive the following task-orientated roles as being commonly seen: boundary spanner, team player, evaluator/critic, contribution seeker, and information provider.

Form of Threat

The fourth characteristic along which extreme environments can be characterized is the form of the threat(s) presented to the teams. Hannah et al. (2009) argue that threats can be physical, psychological, or material. In the case of spaceflight, while threats can exist on any of the three aforementioned dimensions, they are most often physical and psychological. Factors such as isolation, confinement, and disruption of family life drive the increased need for team roles that are targeted at maintaining the psychosocial health of the team, in addition to the physical health. Therefore, we predict that the enactment of behavioral sets of activities that serve to reduce interpersonal conflict (e.g., harmonizer), maintain team morale, redirect crew attention from the negative aspects (e.g., team builder, entertainer), and ensure that personal physical and space needs are met (e.g., nurturer) are the key social roles that will be seen within extreme environments. The latter set of roles (e.g., nurturer) arise to fulfill the gap created based on the confinement and isolation from loved ones who might otherwise ensure these basic needs are met.

• simple  Hypothesis 3: Social roles that will be most prominently seen in extreme teams (e.g., spaceflight crews) include: the harmonizer, nurturer, team builder, and entertainer.

Role Enactment and Temporal Considerations

While the contextual nature of extreme teams is expected to drive the importance and/or frequency of enactment of particular roles as argued for above, it is also expected that team roles are dynamic and the degree to which specific roles are manifested within a team will vary based on several temporal factors. Below, we begin to set forth a series of propositions driven by the literature on team development, albeit manifested in two different ways. The literature on team development and team dynamics has a long history (e.g., Tuckman, 1965 ; Gersick, 1991 ; Salas et al., 1992 ; Hackman and Wageman, 2005 ; Kozlowski et al., 2009 ; Burke et al., 2017 ), yet in thinking about extreme teams we take a slightly different approach in that we couple team development with contextual factors due to their tightly linked nature in teams.

The context within which we are investigating extreme teams is one in which the team members tend to be task experts, co-located with fellow crew members, and highly driven individuals. These crews also tend to be intact, operate under varied stressors that occur simultaneously, and tend to have high level of isolation and confinement. Therefore, our propositions will touch less upon the team developmental needs as by the time the predominant number of these teams are on a mission, they have already been exposed to a wide variety of team building and training exercises and in most cases have prior knowledge of crew members (if not prior working experience with them). Instead, we focus predominantly on how team needs may change over time based on the temporal duration of the missions within which the team is operating.

Work by Salas et al. (1992) has argued, and later research has shown (e.g., Mathieu et al., 2008 ), that in order to be effective, teams must master two tracks of skills – taskwork and teamwork. Specifically, the taskwork track represents “task-orientated skills that members must understand and acquire for task performance” ( Salas et al., 1992 , p. 10). In contrast, the teamwork track refers to “the behavioral interaction and attitudinal responses that team members must develop before they can function effectively as a team” (p. 11). We expect that teams operating in extreme contexts are no different than most operational teams in this regard (i.e., both sets must be mastered, as indicated by Hypothesis 1). However, we do propose that teams operating in these extreme environments have different challenges that cause the instrumentality of roles related to the maintenance of these two tracks to differ over time.

Within the set of extreme teams under consideration, missions of shorter duration tend to be characterized by high operational tempo due to the high workload present as crew members strive to complete science payloads, engage in public outreach and educational efforts, adhere to exercise and diet schedules, and ensure the equipment in transport vehicles and the habitat are working properly. The degree of high operational tempo seen in missions of short duration drives the crew into a very task-oriented mindset. Therefore, within these missions when the crew is together for shorter periods of time roles will tend to revolve around ensuring task needs are met. This is not to say that social roles are not important on the shorter duration missions, but the social stressors that the teams are exposed to on the short duration missions are not as salient as the task-orientated stressors. For these reasons, we would expect that in terms of frequency of enactment, there would be a greater proportion of task roles enacted on those missions that fall within the short duration category. The social stressors that the teams are presented with on short missions may be viewed as low level, while task stressors tend to be of higher levels and oscillate between acute and chronic in nature. Although not conducted with extreme teams, a review of team studies conducted by Bradley et al. (2003) revealed a pattern consistent with this expectation. They found that teams working on tasks of shorter duration, as compared to longer duration tasks, focused on “the task to the exclusion of efforts to form cohesive team norms that would only benefit the teams if they were going to remain together for the performance of future tasks” (p. 12). This evidence suggests that teams are less likely to invest in interpersonal relations and focus on fostering group norms via social roles when focused on tasks or missions of shorter duration (i.e., <=15 days).

• simple  Hypothesis 4: In shorter duration missions, task roles will be the driving factor in facilitating team performance, particularly those roles which foster the self-regulatory capacity of the team and facilitate collective mindfulness (e.g., boundary spanning, evaluator/critic).

As the duration of the mission increases, and correspondingly the team is exposed to the extreme conditions for longer periods of time, we expect that the enactment of social roles will become more prominent. The task-based stressors do not disappear as many are defining features of the extreme environment; however, the perceptions of isolation and confinement increase and begin to take a socio-emotional toll on the team. This effect is commonly reported in literature with respect to teams that have been deployed within extreme conditions for long periods of time. This phenomena is known as the third-quarter effect whereby individuals within isolated extreme environments often experience a decrease in mood and affect during the third quarter of their deployment or mission ( Evans et al., 1987 ; Bechtel and Berning, 1991 ; Steel, 2001 ). This, in turn, is expected to drive an increased focus on behaviors that are related to ensuring that the social needs of the team are being met as a way to combat this natural drop in affect and mood. Moreover, teams formed for a longer period of time, as compared to teams working on tasks of shorter duration, have been found to invest more effort in forming relationships with other team members because they are aware that the longer task duration makes it more beneficial to have these relationships ( Bradley et al., 2003 ). In line with this evidence, we suggest this is another reason, in addition to contending with the extreme environment (e.g., Steel, 2001 ), that more social roles are likely to be enacted on longer duration missions. Team members may engage in more social roles with the underlying goal of forming close relationships with other team members due to the longer duration of the mission.

• simple  Hypothesis 5: As team duration increases within extreme contexts the enactment of social roles become more frequent. Particularly, those roles that foster the socioemotional health of the team such as behaviors which provide an escape from the stressors present as well as behaviors which seek to maintain the emotional and physical health of the team (e.g., entertainer/jokester, nurturer).

Materials and Methods

In order to test our assumptions and to gain a better understanding of team roles in extreme teams, with an emphasis on spaceflight crews, a historiometric approach ( Simonton, 2003 ) was applied. Historiometry describes the systematic analysis of the content of past events and is defined as the “collection of methods in which archival data concerning historic individuals and events are subjected to quantitative analyses in order to test nomothetic hypotheses about human thought, feeling, and action” ( Simonton, 1998 , p. 269). This method is especially useful for exploring a relatively new research area, such as examining the dynamic nature of team roles in extreme environments, because it depends on data that were not explicitly collected for the research question of interest, thus limiting some bias. Further benefits of this approach include the contextual richness of the data and the corresponding external validity ( Crayne and Hunter, 2018 ). Historiometry also enables the examination of complex constructs as expressed in behavior (e.g., team roles) during real situations, and the investigation of how such (team) constructs may differ depending on the type of situation ( Antonakis et al., 2003 ). Recent studies have similarly applied historiometric analysis to explore topics such as team leadership in mission critical/isolated environments, successfully providing insight into other relatively new team-level research areas (e.g., DeChurch et al., 2011 ; Burke et al., 2018 ).

The final sample used to examine our hypotheses consisted of 525 roles extracted from 514 critical incidents describing collective team interaction within the context of spaceflight. The incidents and coded roles came from the following seven missions that varied in length, allowing an examination of how team roles may vary over time: Shuttle, Soyuz, Gemini, Skylab, Salyut, Mir, and Mars 500.

The first step was to identify historical events (i.e., missions) that documented team interaction within the context of spaceflight. Sources were identified through the following databases: EBSCOhost, Google, and Google Scholar. Sources were also identified by searching the following websites: Amazon, Johnson Space Center, and European Space Agency. Both primary (e.g., diaries and autobiographies) and secondary sources (e.g., biographies and missions reports) ( Simonton, 1990 ) were collected (see Table 3 for complete list of final sources used). Sources were examined for the extent to which they described team interaction and corresponding behaviors whereby critical incidents regarding team role enactment could be extracted. Of specific interest was task and social role enactment as evidenced within collaborative activities that occurred while members were engaged in their primary tasks (i.e., task execution) as well as those that occurred during off-task periods (i.e., downtime). Information related to duration of the spaceflight missions comprising our sample was also collected ( Table 4 ). The missions identified fell into one of four durations: short (15 days or less), medium (greater than 15 days, maximum 6 months), long (greater than 6 months, maximum 1½ years), longest (longer than 1½ years, maximum 2 years).

Sources and the respective spaceflight context.

Differentiating of spaceflight context based on mission duration.

The initial search produced approximately 150 sources for further examination. Sources were then examined with respect to the following criteria: (a) sources must describe interdependent interaction among the crew/team; (b) sources must describe crew/team actions where team role behaviors (positive or negative) are present and described; (c) teams being described must be operating in a real or simulated spaceflight environment; and (d) source must be accessible. A group of psychologists with experience in team roles and historiometric analysis reviewed the suitability of all sources as described previously, while taking into consideration the representation of all different spaceflight contexts and missions durations. At the end of this stage, a set of 39 sources remained (i.e., 14 books and 25 diaries).

In order to systematically extract all relevant information from the final set of 39 sources, seven subject matter experts were trained on the critical incident technique and its application in the current context ( Flanagan, 1954 ). The critical incident technique has been described as a set procedures that assist in the systematic extraction of human behavioral observation which may be “…adapted to meet the specific demands of the situation at hand” (p. 335). The first step in developing a critical incident is to understand the aim of the incident. For us, the aim is driven by our stated research questions. Therefore, the raters responsible for extraction of the critical incidents needed to understand what team roles were and how they manifest in teams. While all raters had a prior familiarity with team roles, ensuring their understanding was the initial part of our training. Next, training progressed to incident extraction. While the specific form a critical incident may take can vary based on the researcher’s need, for the current project, extraction included a behavioral description of team interaction at a specific point in time during the team’s mission as well as the consequence of that interaction (see Table 5 for examples).

Example statements and categorization.

Once extracted, all incidents were double-coded by two SMEs with experience in teams (and more specifically team roles). The SMEs were asked to independently sort the identified roles into role type (i.e., social, task, or non-applicable), role category (e.g., team player, contribution seeker, or non-applicable), and if applicable into role subcategory. Raters utilized the Burke et al. (2016) taxonomy as a baseline for their coding, but were told not be restricted by the dimensions contained within that particular taxonomy. For some incidents, more than one role category was identified. For testing the interrater reliability among the SMEs, we calculated Krippendorff’s alpha, a standard reliability measure regardless of the number of observers, levels of measurement, sample sizes, and presence or absence of missing data, by using the respective SPSS macro ( Hayes and Krippendorff, 2007 ). The interrater agreement was excellent for role type (Krippendorff’s α = 0.79), role category (Krippendorff’s α = 0.77), and for role subcategory (Krippendorff’s α = 0.75) ( Cicchetti, 1994 ). In the final step, a meeting was held where both SMEs came to consensus regarding any discrepancies in their codes.

Data Analysis

Data analysis consisted of two primary foci. First, to examine the set of propositions pertaining to team role enactment within extreme teams (Hypotheses 1–3), the roles that emerged from the card sort were rank-ordered by their frequency of occurrence. The frequency of each role type (i.e., task, social), role category (e.g., jokester, critic) and role subcategory (if applicable) was calculated.

To examine the dynamic nature of the identified team roles, we differentiated between spaceflight contexts in terms of the mission’s duration (i.e., short, medium, long, and longer duration, see Table 5 ). Specifically, we adopted a comparative method (e.g., Gardner, 1993 ) by comparing and contrasting the illustrated team roles, in order to extract the common and differing role characteristics between the various temporal durations.

One of the primary questions posed within the current study was with regard to the types of task and social roles exhibited in teams operating within extreme contexts, using spaceflight crews as an exemplar. Closely related to this question was an examination of how temporal factors (i.e., mission duration) impact the nature of team roles exhibited. In this vein, five hypotheses were put forth regarding the team roles expected to be the most prevalent based on the defining features of spaceflight crews operating in extreme contexts and the frequency of specific role enactment based on mission duration.

With respect to Hypothesis 1, as predicted, results indicate that in terms of frequency both task and social roles were enacted in nearly equal proportions. Specifically, collapsing across missions, results indicated that 51% of the roles witnessed were social roles, while 49% of the roles were task-related ( N = 267 and 258, respectively). Additionally, results indicated that many of the roles seen in previous taxonomies developed with respect to teams operating in more traditional, non-extreme environments also appeared in the current context (e.g., team builder, jokester, team player, information provider). However, at a global level there were some differences to note. First was the presence of the social role of “entertainer.” While similar to the jokester role seen in many role taxonomies outside of extreme contexts, the entertainer role is broader. Specifically, we define it as behaviors which seek to maintain cohesion and emotional well-being of team members through humor and other active, public forms of artistic expression. Additionally, the role of “nurturer” was a prominent role that does not often appear outside this context. This role consists of behaviors primarily focused on the maintenance of the physical health and personal space of crew members. Finally, of note is the lack of enactment of what would traditionally be considered negative roles consisting of behaviors directed at fellow team members (e.g., attention seeking, social loafing, expression of negativity). While a negativist role was frequently seen in some contexts it tended to consist of negative affect (i.e., complaining) regarding environmental, contextual, or equipment difficulties; it did not tend to be directed toward fellow crew members. When it was directed at individuals, it was most often members of ground control.

Hypotheses 2–3 described the task and social roles that were believed to be the most critical to teams operating in extreme contexts, such as spaceflight. To examine the data in relation to the hypothesis presented herein, the team roles that emerged from the card sort were rank-ordered in terms of their frequency of occurrence with respect to task and social roles, respectively. With respect to the predictions set forth in Hypothesis 2, findings were mixed. In line with predictions, the roles of boundary spanner, team player, and information provider emerged within the top five most frequently occuring task roles (see Table 6 ). The team player role is comprised of behaviors that reflect a willingness to pitch in wherever help is needed. Whereas, the information provider is comprised of behaviors serving to transmit and gather informaton within the team and create shared mental models. Finally, the boundary spanning role involves those behaviors which serve to maintain a link between the team and external entities and may involve the pulling and pushing of information. However, also occuring within the top five, but not predicted, were the coordinator role (encompassing subroles of team leader and project management) and the visionary/innovator role. The later role involving behaviors related to problem solving and thinking outside the box. Finally, contrary to predictions, behaviors related to the analysis and evaluation of ideas (e.g., critic) did not appear within the top five enacted task roles.

Rank ordering of the top five task roles which emerged.

Hypothesis 3 pertained to the enactment of social roles. Similar to Hypothesis 2, results suggest partial support for this prediction. As expected, the team builder, entertainer, and nurturer roles were witnessed within the top five most enacted social roles (see Table 7 ). This reflects the importance of positive behaviors that improve the team‘s social structure and well-being. Specifically, the team builder reflects behaviors which seek to improve and maintain the social structure of the team, including behaviors that foster motivation and harmony. A subrole of this dimension is the nurturer role which primarily focuses on behaviors promoting the physical and emotional well-being of crew members, including personal space. However, the presence of behaviors reflecting an explicit negative outlook (i.e., the negativist) was unexpected. In further examining the results, these role behaviors primarily came from crews involved in the Skylab mission where relations between mission control and the crew degraded to such a point that the crew went on strike. Dropping the mission where the crew went on strike does drastically reduce the prevalence with which these behaviors are seen, but they would still appear within the top five. However, the focus then becomes negative comments related primarily to environmental and equipment conditions, with much less of a focus being on interpersonal negativity. Table 8 contains a full listing of all team roles which emerged and the frequency with which emergence took place (both task and social).

Rank ordering of the top five social roles which emerged.

Relative frequency of enactment of task and social roles (as compared to one another).

Additionally, we conducted exploratory analyses to determine the five most commonly enacted roles when looking across the total set of task and social roles. As can be seen in Tables 8 , ​ ,9, 9 , results indicated the following five roles were the most frequently occurring, in order: boundary spanner, team builder, entertainer, negativist, and team player. This last role was closely followed by the presence of the visionary/innovator role. In essence this analysis pits social and task roles against one another to examine the most frequently occurring roles across the set of extreme contexts.

Rank ordering of the top five team roles enacted across task and social categories.

Roles Over Time

Another primary goal of our study was to investigate the degree to which roles may vary across spaceflight contexts in terms of mission duration. As is common with the exploration of phenomena on which there is not a large body of prior work upon which to build hypotheses (and one reason for the approach taken), the hypotheses concerning the specific task and social roles expected to be most prevalent based on temporal duration received mixed support. Table 10 contains the full list of task and social team roles, their frequency counts and percentages as delineated by temporal duration.

Emergence of team roles by temporal duration of mission 4 .

Results indicated that during short missions (i.e., less than 15 days), task team roles emerged twice as frequent ( N = 84) as social roles ( N = 48), while during medium duration missions (i.e., up to 6 months), the exact opposite role distribution was found between task ( N = 44) and social ( N = 80) team roles. During long (i.e., up to 1.5 years) and longer spaceflight missions (i.e., more than 2 years), the task ( N = 98 in long missions, N = 32 in longer missions) and social ( N = 99 in long missions, N = 40 in longer missions) team roles were evenly distributed. It seems that task roles are notably salient in very short missions, while social roles are gaining importance as the duration of the mission increases. At the same time, when the duration of the spaceflight missions exceeds a duration of 6 months both task and social team roles become equally frequent (see Table 11 ). The above set of results tends to support the primary tenets put forth in Hypotheses 4 and 5. Specifically, that the enactment of task roles are the most prominent within missions of short duration, while social roles gain more prominence as mission duration increases.

Frequencies of task and social roles identified for each mission duration.

However, in looking at the predictions as to what particular task and social roles would appear most prominently, we received mixed results (see Table 10 ). One of the top task role categories, similarly frequent in all mission durations, was the team player, highlighting the importance of being willing and prepared to contribute and help whenever and wherever needed. The boundary spanner role also emerged as one of the top task roles in all mission durations, gaining frequence with increasing duration up to long duration missions; during the longer duration missions, the frequence of the boundary spanner was lower compared to the other mission durations. The opposite trend emerged for the third top task role for all mission durations – visionary/innovator; this social role decreased in frequency as mission duration was increasing, demonstrating its lowest frequency during long duration missions. For the longer mission duration, the visionary/innovator role emerged more frequently than in any other mission duration. The task role of team leader, highlighting the importance of leadership-oriented behaviors focusing on directing the teams toward mission completion, was identified as one of the top social roles only in short duration missions.

The entertainer role was one of the top social roles that similarly emerged in all mission durations, demonstrating the relevance of positive behaviors that serve to bring humor into the team. The team builder was identified as one more top team role in almost all spaceflight contexts, gaining frequence with increasing mission duration. During short duration missions, the frequency of the team builder role was noticeably lower compared to the other mission durations. The complainer team role, reflecting negative behaviors of complaining and whining about social team issues, emerged as one further top social role only for medium mission duration.

The use of teams has become ubiquitous within organizations due to the potential for teams to accomplish complex and interdependent work within environments that are increasingly dynamic. A well coordinated team is not only a pleasure to watch, but can bring tremendous rewards to organizations by leveraging the combined intellectual strength of its individual members. However, more often is the case that teams are implemented, yet fail to fully capitalize on the potential synergy present in the team; when capitalized upon, this synergy allows teams to become more than the sum of their individual member contributions. In effort to facilitate the probability that teams can leverage this potential capacity, there has been a tremendous amount of research conducted on the factors that facilitate the ability for members to work in a coordinated and adaptive manner such that they are ready to respond to changes both internal and external to the team. Due to the tremendous growth in team research and the corresponding lessons learned, a great deal of guidance can be currently provided to organizations regarding team dynamics. However, as noted by the editors of this special issue, sorely lacking in the area of team research is guidance pertaining to how the instrumentality of processes, states, and facilitating factors seen in team effectiveness models and team taxonomic efforts may vary due to temporal factors.

Due to the complexity of teams there are a variety of ways that temporal factors could be operationalized within teams, including but not limited to: the moment to moment changes in team process dynamics, oscillations between transition and action phase while engaging in a performance episode, team developmental stage, and/or length of time the team has been together. Within the current study, we have begun to take initial steps to delineate how team roles may vary over time by examining teams operating within extreme environments over short, medium, and long durations. Given our interest in team roles and how they may change over time within extreme teams, we chose to initially investigate this phenomena at a more global level in terms of time. The path we chose was dictated by the fact that, while dynamic, the enactment and switching of roles is most likely not as dynamic as changes in team process, thereby pushing us initially toward a more global view of time. In addition, given the lack of research on team roles over time within teams operating in extreme conditions we did not feel the theory was yet there to begin to predict moment to moment changes at a fine-grained level.

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. Additionally, our findings begin to highlight areas of commonality and distinction between these environments and the more traditional organizational environments in which teams have been studied. In essence, while there were many commonalities between the team roles seen in the context of spaceflight and those which appear in the team role taxonomies which appear in the broader literature on teams, there were also differences. In terms of commonalities, task roles such as the team player, coordinator, evaluator/synthesizer, information provider/facilitator were seen. However, far less commonly seen were task related roles that may be considered dysfunctional (e.g., social loafer, power seeker). The decreased prevalence of these roles may be due to the mission critical environment in which the teams in this sample (and many teams in extreme environments) are embedded. Mistakes in these environments can often be extremely costly not only in terms of material, but personal resources – in some cases life threatening.

Many of the differences seen in terms of role enactment dealt with aspects of the social roles. Perhaps most prevalent was the expansion of the traditional jokester role to encompass a more inclusive entertainer role. This role reflects the elevation of mood and team member bonding not only through humor, but also through competitive activities and coming up with novel ways to occupy “down time.” Additionally, the team builder role incorporated the notion not only of behaviors which serve to reduce conflict and promote harmony among team members, but behaviors that serve to keep the team motivated, and behaviors that are more “nurturing” by nature. This later aspect of the team building role is one that is not often explicitly mentioned in the team taxonomies that appear in the broader literature. Finally, it is interesting to note that results did suggest a prevalence of behaviors related to negative affect; however, the predominant amount of these affective remarks were not directed at the immediate crew, but were either directed outside the immediate crew, or expressed in relation to conditions or equipment. This points to the fact that the atypical stressors present in the environment do serve to impact the affect of teams within extreme contexts; being resilient in these environments does not mean that negative affect does not occur. Future research should further investigate the mechanisms through which the team deals with the negativity when expressed. It is likely that some of the other social roles seen may serve as a buffer against the negativist comments, but this needs to be further investigated.

Furthermore, the exploration into how mission duration, or the degree of time that the team is embedded within the extreme environment, also revealed interesting findings. In particular, variation in the instrumentality of task role enactment on missions of shorter duration and the increased prevalence of social roles as mission duration increased. This points to the increased attention paid to the socioemotional impact that operating within extreme environments can have on the team and the types of social roles that teams utilize to mitigate some of these negative effects and remain resilient to the multitude of stressors. Often when examining teams operating in extreme environments there is a tendency to focus on the task-related effects of the stressors, with less of a focus on the socioemotional aspects. The findings from the current study begin to highlight the increased importance of not neglecting the socioemotional health of the team. Additionally, based on the current sample we see the following trends: (1) increased enactment of the team builder role, (2) prominence of the entertainer role, and (3) increased emphasis on the visionary/problem solver role on missions over 2 years. Of additional interest is the continued prevalence of the boundary spanner role even though these teams were operating under conditions of isolation and confinement. In part the prevalence of this role may be an artifact of the sample itself reflecting the communication between the flight crew and mission control. However, the role of boundary spanner has also been seen in extreme teams outside the context of spaceflight ( Burke et al., 2018 ). Future research should continue to investigate the nature and instrumentality of this role under varying levels of isolation and confinement.

Limitations

The examination of archival accounts of teams operating in extreme contexts provides a wealth of contextually rich information concerning real teams operating together over time. However, as with any method, it also has limitations. For example, it does not facilitate an understanding of the relationship of identified team roles to their impact on team processes and emergent states. Additionally, the source documents which were examined to pull critical incidents from were not written with our research questions in mind. While this may be considered a strength, as it may serve to eliminate biases concerning social desirability, given the archival nature it does not negate the possibility that the individual accounts themselves are biased. We attempted to mitigate this possibility to the extent it was possible by collecting information from multiple sources. Related to the fact that the source documents were not written for our specific purposes is the fact that while they were contextually rich they do not provide the level of detail needed in order to investigate team roles at a finer grained temporal level to capture more moment-to-moment changes. Future research should continue to explore these questions using a cross-section of methodologies as each method has its own strengths and weaknesses and it is only through a combination of methodologies that confidence will grow and theory will move forward.

Future Research

The results herein begin to highlight those task and social roles that are important within extreme teams. While we did not explicitly compare high and low performing teams in the current study at some level the teams contained within could be considered effective in that the missions were accomplished without serious bodily harm. Future research should more explicitly investigate differences between high and low performing teams to more finely delineate areas in which team roles are likely to falter as this could point to potential countermeasures. Moreover, investigation into the temporal dynamics relating to team roles is an area that is wide open. We have begun to provide some initial findings herein as to how time may impact the type of team roles which are enacted. However, future research could begin to examine how often the informally defined team roles examined herein are associated with team enactment of action and transition phases during performance episodes. Leveraging work by Marks et al. (2001) , one could imagine that the enactment of particular team roles could be used to drive the efficiency and effectiveness of the phases of cyclical activity which comprise performance episodes. Additionally, future research could begin to highlight those roles that are essential to move teams along different phases of the developmental continuum.

Up to this point, team roles and many other team factors have tended to primarily been examined at a single point in time (usually at the end of the mission), with little attention paid to how the myriad of temporal factors present may impact how they evolve and change with regard to their implementation or instrumentality. It is our hope that the findings presented here and the many new questions that emerge will serve to spur future research in this area.

Author Contributions

All authors contributed to the writing and assisted in the theoretical development of the manuscript. CB was responsible for conceptualization of the manuscript.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Funding. This work was supported by funding from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Grant NNX16AB08G). The views expressed in this work are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the organizations with which they are affiliated or their sponsoring institutions.

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• Leadership |
• Team roles: 9 types to create a balance ...

Team roles: 9 types to create a balanced team

Dr. Meredith Belbin developed the team role theory based on common behavioral attributes. The Belbin model divides the roles into action-oriented, thought-oriented, and people-oriented categories to balance teams and increase productivity.

Working in a team takes organization and collaboration. For teams to be most productive, everyone should have a specific role that aligns with their strengths. 

Dr. Meredith Belbin developed the team role theory based on behavioral attributes. Belbin’s nine team roles fall into three categories: action-oriented, thought-oriented, and people-oriented.

Action-oriented team members are ready to put things in action and they do well with strict deadlines. Thought-oriented team members are critical thinkers who may bring new ideas to the table. People-oriented team members have strong communication skills, which can help them support the entire team. 

Shapers are team members who drive the team forward. They are action-oriented, motivating themselves and others despite any issues that arise. Shapers are natural leaders , so they do well in management roles. When a crisis occurs, these individuals are quick to find a solution.

Example of the shaper team role: Using a product marketing team as an example, the shaper would be the head of product, who oversees the team vision and the roadmap to get there.  

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2. Implementer

Implementers are also action-oriented team members, and they maintain order in their environments. They’re practical and thrive at bringing ideas to fruition. Although implementers like to take action, they’re also highly disciplined. These individuals may be the backbone of a team because they can confidently support other team members.  

Example of the implementer team role: The implementer would be a data-driven business analyst on the product marketing team, assessing ways to make the organization’s processes more efficient.

3. Completer finisher

The last of the action-oriented team roles are the completer finishers. True to their name, completer finishers are heads-down individuals who notice fine details and strive for perfection. These team members may be more introverted, but they’re valuable in work environments because they push team members to produce high-quality work. 

Example of the completer finisher team role: Completer finishers would do well in tech support. They know how to identify and fix problems both quickly and efficiently.

The plant is a thought-oriented team member who’s an innovative and creative thinker. Although plants help balance out the team, they prefer to brainstorm and solidify their own ideas before sharing to the greater team. Plants may prefer to work alone , but they bring valuable input even if they aren’t as outspoken as other team members. 

Example of the plant team role: Plants are highly creative, which is why they would make great product designers.

5. Monitor evaluator

Another thought-oriented team role is the monitor evaluator. This type is a rational thinker and can put their emotions aside for problem solving. Monitor evaluators work best when their projects require advanced knowledge and strategic planning . They assess ideas to determine if they are valuable and viable, then take the steps to push those ideas forward. 

Example of the monitor evaluator team role: Monitor evaluators are your hyper-organized project managers , strategically scoping projects and connecting the dots across teams. 

6. Specialist

The last thought-oriented team role is the specialist. Specialists have in-depth knowledge in their field and they like to contribute to one area of expertise. Specialists follow the pattern of all the thought-oriented team roles in that they work better alone than in a group. Although this individual is more independent, they provide a lot of value to the team with their specific skill set.

Example of the specialist team role: Specialists may be your coders, your SEO analysts, or your technical crew on the team—their job is specialized on a skill the rest of the team may not know much about, and thankfully they have it covered. 

7. Coordinator

Moving on to the people-oriented team roles, the coordinator is a team member with great communication skills. Coordinators are often in leadership positions because they promote collaboration and motivate the team to accomplish their goals. Other team members look up to coordinators and trust them to make a decision. 

Example of the coordinator team role: Coordinators enjoy collaborating and motivating others, so they’d thrive as the lead of a team of product developers. 

8. Teamworker

Teamworkers are also people-oriented. Their extroverted personalities help them function well with others and listen to their teammates. These team members can adapt easily to changes in their environment and they know how to create harmony if conflict arises . If one team member has too much on their plate or another has a family emergency, teamworkers are the first to step in and offer support. 

Example of the teamworker team role: Because teamworkers are natural collaborators, they’d excel as a product marketer within a larger team.

9. Resource investigator

The last of the nine team roles is the resource investigator. These people-oriented individuals enjoy exploring new opportunities like finding potential marketing opportunities for the company or chatting up stakeholders for a new product launch. Their positive attitude makes them a natural networker or facilitator of new business. 

Example of the resource investigator: Because resource investigators like to network with others, they’d thrive in product sales.

How to create a balanced team

Creating balanced teams at work can be more of a challenge when you have a variety of personalities and strengths at play. It’s unlikely that most teams will have the people to fill all nine team roles, which is why it’s critical to know how to work with the team you have and utilize each team member’s strengths. 

Build on your team’s strengths

Every team role has its strengths and weaknesses. Being aware of these can help you create a more balanced team. For example, a plant may be less comfortable communicating, but they know how to solve complex problems. A completer finisher may not have a lot of experience with teamwork, but they always deliver on time. 

When assigning responsibilities to team members, focus on each team member’s strengths. You can do this using practice tasks or employee assessments. When team members can use their strengths at work each day, your team will function at its best.

Assess gaps in your team

If you have too many individuals with the same strengths on one team, clashes and gaps can occur. For example, having too many thought-oriented people and not enough action-oriented people can lead to too many ideas with no execution. 

You can become aware of gaps on your team with regular assessments. Not only should you assess team member performance, but you should observe the way team members work together. You can shift responsibilities and work duties based on natural behavior and personality types. Team building games are a great way to connect with your team and learn how you work well together.

Review team roles regularly

It’s essential to review team roles and responsibilities regularly so you can build high-performing teams. Using quarterly assessments, you can evaluate team member progress and assess whether individuals have improved their skills with time, would fit better in a different role, or could benefit from additional training. 

For example, someone who is generally an introverted, thought-oriented person may gain confidence and develop their communication skills. After further evaluation, you might find that they’re a people-oriented person and would thrive in a leadership role. Without regular review and open communication, team members cannot grow into new roles. 

Team management tools

Team management tools can provide clarity when assigning tasks and completing projects as a group. After all, collaboration is easier when everyone has visibility into who's doing what and by when. With clarity and insight into each team member's priorities, the entire team can function better together.

Workload management

An important part of team management is being proactive in managing workloads. Workload management involves visualizing schedules, understanding project life cycles, and using tools to gain insight on both people and projects. This is key to keep projects running smoothly without putting too much pressure on one person. 

Resource allocation

Successfully allocating resources is essential to project and team success. Resource allocation helps you determine the availability of resources, how many resources you need for each project, and what team members are best suited to accomplish each project. Creating a resource management plan is a great way to keep projects on track from start to finish. 

A roles and responsibilities matrix, also known as a RACI chart , helps teams clarify project roles and figure out who is responsible for a given task. The acronym stands for responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed. To create a RACI chart, outline every task in a project. Then, assign one of these four labels to each member of your team for each task at hand.

Kanban boards

Kanban boards are a great way for team members to visualize what stage a project is in so you know what’s left to bring it to completion. Using cards to represent work items, Kanban boards allow team members to visually plot out projects and workflows. This system makes projects easier to visualize by providing a clear view of the stage and priority of each initiative.

Team collaboration tools

Team collaboration is much easier when you have the right tools. Who wouldn’t want to eliminate the busywork? You can not only streamline tasks, but team members can align their goals, manage changes, share files, and more.

Having one team collaboration tool can prevent project risks from occurring and improve management of tasks across the board. To help all employees thrive in their roles, making the tool accessible to all will make everyone’s job easier. 

Balanced teams increase team productivity

Using Belbin’s nine team roles can help create a balanced work environment so your team can be more productive. When you know how to play to your team’s strengths, they’ll be happier in their roles and you’ll be able to collaborate to complete tasks more efficiently. 

Related resources

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When to use collaboration vs. coordination

Internal and External Environment Factors of Organizational Environment

Organizational environment denotes internal and external environmental factors influencing organizational activities and decision-making.

Let’s Learn About The Environment Factors of Organizational Environment

What is organizational environment.

Every organization, whether business or non-business, has its environment. The organizational environment is always dynamic and ever-changing.

Changes today are so frequent, and every change brings so many challenges that managers and leaders of the organization need to be vigilant about environmental changes. The environment of an organization consists of its surroundings – anything that affects its operations favorably or unfavorably.

Environment embraces such abstract things as an organization’s image and such remote visible issues as the country’s economic conditions and political situations .

The environmental forces, abstract and visible, need careful analysis. The systematic and adequate analysis produces the information necessary for deciding what strategy to pursue.

Managers cannot make appropriate and sound strategies simply based on their guesses and instincts. They must use relevant information that directly flows from their organization’s environment analysis.

Internal and External Environment Factors that Influences Organizational Decision Making

By the word “environment,” we understand the surroundings or conditions in which a particular activity is carried on.

And we know that an organization is a social entity that has a hierarchical structure where all necessary items are put together. They act within it to reach the collective goal.

Organizations or, more specifically, business organizations and their activities are always being affected by the environment. In an organization, the management body’s actions are influenced by the environment.

Types of Organizational Environment

Organizations have an external and internal environment;

• Internal environment / Micro environment.
• General environment.
• Industry environment.

An organization’s operations are affected by both types of environments.

Therefore, managers need to make an in-depth analysis of the elements of the environment so that they can develop an understanding of the internal and external situations of the organization.

Based on their understanding, they will be better able to establish the required objectives for their organization and formulate appropriate strategies to achieve those objectives.

In this post, we will look at the elements of the organization’s environment.

Internal Environment of Organization

Forces, conditions, or surroundings within the organization’s boundary are elements of the organization’s internal environment.

The internal environment generally consists of elements within or inside the organization, such as physical resources, financial resources, human resources , information resources, technological resources, the organization’s goodwill, corporate culture, and the like.

The internal environment includes everything within the boundaries of the organization.

Some of these are tangible, such as the physical facilities, the plant capacity technology, proprietary technology, or know-how; some are intangible, such as information processing and communication capabilities, reward and task structure, performance expectations, power structure management capability , and dynamics of the organization’s culture.

Based on those resources, the organization can create and deliver value to the customer. This value is fundamental to defining the organization’s purpose and the premise on which it seeks to be profitable.

Are we adding value through research and development or customer service, or by prompt delivery, or by cutting any intermediary which reduces the customers’ costs?

Organizations build capabilities over a long time. They consistently invest in some areas so that they can build strong competitive businesses based on the uniqueness they have created.

The manager’s response to the external environment would depend upon the availability and the configuration of resource deployment within the organization.

The deployment of resources is a key managerial responsibility.

Top management is vested with the responsibility of allocating resources between the ongoing operations/activities and future operations of strategic nature. That is they might yield returns in some future time that require resources now to be nurtured and have some associated risks.

The top management has to balance the conflicting demands of both, as resources are always finite.

For example, General Electric is an aggressive innovator and marketer who has been ruthless in its approach to changing proactively as well as reactively to sustain its competitive positions in the respective industries.

This implies that over the years, General Electric has invested in developing those capabilities, systems, and processes that enable it to respond.

The internal environment consists mainly of the organization’s owners, the board of directors, employees, and culture .

6 elements of the internal environment are;

Owners and Shareholders

Owners are people who invest in the company and have property rights and claims on the organization. Owners can be individuals or groups of persons who started the company; or bought a share of the company in the share market.

They have the right to change the company’s policy at any time.

Owners of an organization may be an individual in the case of a sole proprietorship business , partners in a partnership firm, shareholders or stockholders in a limited company, or members in a cooperative society. In public enterprises, the government of the country is the owner.

Whoever the owners are, they are an integral part of the organization’s internal environment. Owners play an important role in influencing the affairs of the business. This is the reason why managers should take more care of the owners of their organizations .

Board of Directors

The board of directors is the company’s governing body elected by stockholders. They oversee a firm’s top managers, such as the general manager.

Employees or the workforce, are the most important element of an organization’s internal environment, which performs the administration tasks. Individual employees and also the labor unions they join are important parts of the internal environment.

If managed properly they can positively change the organization’s policy. But ill-management of the workforce could lead to a catastrophic situation for the company.

Organizational Culture

Organizational culture is the collective behavior of members of an organization and the values , visions, beliefs, and habits that they attach to their actions.

An organization’s culture plays a major role in shaping its success because culture is an important determinant of how well the organization will perform.

As the foundation of the organization’s internal environment, it plays a major role in shaping managerial behavior .

An organization’s culture is viewed as the foundation of its internal environment. Organizational culture (or corporate culture) significantly influences employee behavior.

Culture is important to every employee, including managers who work in the organization.

A strong culture helps a firm achieve its goals better than a firm having a weak culture . Culture in an organization develops and ‘blossoms’ over many years, starting from the practices of the founder(s).

Since culture is an important internal environmental concern for an organization, managers need to understand its influence on organizational activities.

Resources of the Organization

An organization s resources can be discussed under five broad heads: physical resources, human resources, financial resources, informational resources, and technological resources.

Physical resources include land and buildings, warehouses, and all kinds of materials, equipment, and machinery. Examples are office buildings, computers, furniture, fans, and air conditioners.

Human resources include all employees of the organization from the top level to the lowest level of the organization . Examples are teachers in a university, marketing executives in a manufacturing company, and manual workers in a factory.

Financial resources include capital used for financing the organization’s operations, including working capital .

Examples are investments by owners, profits, reserve funds, and revenues received out of a sale. Informational resources encompass ‘usable data needed to make effective decisions.

Examples are sales forecasts , supplier price lists, market-related data, employee profiles, and production reports.

Organization’s image/goodwill

The reputation of an organization is a very valuable intangible asset. High reputation or goodwill develops a favorable image of the organization in the minds of the public (so to say, in the minds of the customers).

‘No- reputation’ cannot create any positive image. A negative image destroys the organization’s efforts to attract customers in a competitive world.

The internal environment of an organization consists of the conditions and forces that exist within the organization.

Internal environment {sometimes called micro-environment) portrays an organization’s ‘in-house’ situations.

An organization has full control over these situations. Unlike the external environment, firms can directly control the internal environment .

The internal environment includes various internal factors of the organization, such as resources, owners/shareholders, a board of directors, employees and trade unions, goodwill, and corporate culture. These factors are detailed out below.

External Environment of Organization – Factors Outside of the Organization’s Scope

Factors outside or organization are the elements of the external environment. The organization has no control over how the external environment elements will shape up.

The external environment embraces all general environmental factors and an organization’s specific industry-related factors. The general environmental factors include those that are common in nature and affect all organizations.

Because of their general nature, an individual organization alone may not be able to substantially control its influence on its business operations.

Managers have to continuously read signals from the external environment to spot emerging opportunities and threats. The external environment presents opportunities for growth leadership and market dominance and poses the threat of obsolescence for products, technology, and markets.

While one section of an organization faces opportunities, another faces threats from a similar environment, perhaps because of differentiation in their respective resources, capabilities, and entrenched positions within the industry .

For example, the burgeoning mobile telephone market in India provides enormous opportunities for different types of organizations, from handset manufacturers, content developers, application developers, and mobile signal tower manufacturers to service providers.

At the same time, it poses a threat to the fixed-line telephone business, which has long been the monopoly of public sector enterprises.

The increasing demand for telecommunication services in India post-deregulation was an enormous opportunity for early entrants to enter the telecom services business and compete for revenue with state-owned organizations.

At the same time, the growing demand for mobile services led to an expansion of industrial capacity, price wars, lowering of call tariffs, acquisitions, and declining industry profits.

India has one of the lowest call rates in the world. As the industry matured and consolidation took place, the old players had to alter their business models and strategies.

The external environment can be subdivided into 2 layers;

General Environment of Organization – Common Factors that All Companies in the Economy Face

The general environment usually includes political, economic, sociocultural, technological, legal, environmental (natural), and demographic factors in a particular country or region. The general environment consists of factors that may affect operations but influence the firm’s activities.

The factors of the general environment are broad and non-specific, whereas the dimensions of the task environment are composed of the specific organization.

The external environment consists of an organization’s external factors indirectly affecting its businesses. The organization has little or no control over these factors, so the external environment is generally non-controllable.

However, there may be exceptions. The external environmental factors reside outside the organization, which can lead to opportunities or threats.

For the convenience of analysis, we can divide the external environment into two groups: (a) general environment (or remote environment), and (b) industry environment (some call it the ‘immediate operating environment,’ ‘task environment, or specific environment’).

The general environment consists of factors in the external environment that indirectly affect firms’ business operations.

The major factors that constitute the general environment include political situations, economic conditions, social and cultural factors, technological advancements, legal/regulatory factors, natural environment, and demographics in a particular country or region.

The industry environment consists of those factors in the external environment that exist in the industry in which the organizations operate their business. The industry environmental factors are generally more controllable by a firm than the general environmental factors.

Industry environment comprises those factors in the external environment that exists in tie concerned industry of a firm in which it is operating its business.

For example, US Pharma is operating its business in the pharmaceutical industry.

Therefore, all factors that are likely to affect the business operations of Incepta Pharmaceuticals Limited would be included in the ‘industry environment’ of the company.

There are 6 factors in the industry environment: suppliers, buyers & customers, competitors & new entrants, substitute products, regulators, and strategic partners.

It may be noted that some industry environmental factors, such as competitors and substitute products, may exist even outside the concerned industry.

For example, a leasing company may emerge as a competitor of the companies in the banking industry in terms of attracting deposits and providing loans to business houses.

Regarding the industry environment, the important issue to appreciate is that they reside in the immediate competitive situations of a firm.

Also, they are very specific in that they can be easily identified. For these reasons, they are often regarded as ‘specific environment’ or ‘task environment.’

The strategy-makers must understand the challenges and complexities of the general and industry environmental factors. They must appreciate that the general environmental factors are largely non-controllable because of their distantly located external nature.

When strategists take cognizance of both the general (remote) and industry (operating) environments, they are likely to become more proactive in strategic planning .

In the following discussions, you will find a broad description of the general environment.

8 Elements of the General External Environment

The general environment includes the; distant factors in the external environment that is general or common in nature. Its impact on the firm’s operations, competitors, and customers make its analysis imperative.

We can use the PESTLE model to identify and analyze the factors in the general environment. PESTLE Model covers political, economic, sociocultural, technological, legal, and environmental (natural). Along with these, we can add additional factors that suit the current modern business atmosphere, demographic factors, and international factors.

8 elements or factors of the general environment of an organization are;

Political Legal Factors

The political factors of the general environment refer to the business-government relationship and the overall political situation of a country.

A good business-government relationship is essential to the economy and, most importantly, for the business.

The government of a country intervenes in the national economy by setting policies/rules for business. We see many such policies – import policy, export policy, taxation policy, investment policy, drug policy, competition policy, consumer protection policy, etc.

Sometimes, the government pursues a nationalization policy for state ownership of a business .

Some countries, such as India, pursue state-driven mercantilism to reduce imports and increase exports. Some countries; have liberalized their economy and shifted from centrally managed economies to capitalist economies or welfare economies.

In many 3rd world countries, successive governments emphasize privatization more than state ownership. As global competition has increased, the government has also liberalized its trade policies to align with the WTO agreements.

Another important issue is political stability, which substantially affects business firms’ operations. Divert’s decision about investment is highly affected by political stability.

Managers must be able to understand the implications of the activities of these agencies and groups.

Government agencies include different ministries, the office of the Controller of Imports and Exports, the Board of Investment, the Revenue board or agency, Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Employers’ Associations, the Environmental Protection Movement, and the like.

Since the pressure groups put restraints on business managers, managers should have clear ideas about the actions of these groups.

Economic Factors

The economic factor of an organization is the overall status of the economic system in which the organization operates. The important economic factors for business are inflation, interest rates , and unemployment.

These factors of the economy always affect the demand for products. During inflation, the company pays more for its resources, and to cover its higher costs, they raise commodity prices.

When interest rates are high, customers are less willing to borrow money, and the company itself must pay more when it borrows. When unemployment is high, the company can be very selective about who it hires, but customers’ buying power is low as fewer people are working.

A country’s economic conditions affect market attractiveness. The performance of business organizations is affected by the health of a nation’s economy.

Several economic variables are relevant in determining business opportunities.

Examples of economic factors include the trend in economic growth, population income levels, inflation rate, tax rates for individuals and business organizations, etc.

There is thus a need to analyze the economic environment prudently by the business firms.

The economic environment comprises a distinct variable with which management must be concerned. A country’s economy can be in a situation of boom or recession or depression or recovery, or it may be in a state of fluctuation.

Managers/strategy-makers must be able to predict the economy’s state. These warrants the necessity of studying the economic environment to identify changes, trends, and their strategic implications.

Business organizations operate their businesses in markets consisting of people. These people are likely to become customers when they have purchasing power. And purchasing power depends on income, prices, savings, debt, and availability of credit.

Therefore, business organizations must pay attention to customers’ income and consumption patterns.

However, all the economic variables in the economy must be treated holistically for the clear envisioning of the entire economy and the market.

Socio-Cultural Factors

Customs, mores, values , and demographic characteristics of the society in which the organization operates make up the general environment’s socio-cultural factors.

A manager must well study the socio-cultural dimension. It indicates the product, services, and standards of conduct that society will likely value and appreciate.

The standard of business conduct varies from culture to culture, as does the taste and necessity of products and services. Socio-cultural forces include culture, lifestyle changes, social mobility, attitudes toward technology, and people’s values, opinion, beliefs, etc.

A society’s values and altitudes form the cornerstone of society. They often drive other conditions and changes. The hand for many products changes with the changes in social attitudes .

Socio-cultural factors differ across countries. In many countries, worker diversity is now a common phenomenon.

We find in first world countries the increasing life span of population, trend towards fewer children, movement of population from rural areas to urban areas, increasing rate of female education, more and more women entering the mainstream workforce, etc.

All these have a primary effect on a country’s social character and health.

Therefore, managers of business organizations need to study and predict the impact of social and cultural changes on the future of business operations in terms of meeting consumer needs and interests.

Business firms must offer products in society that correspond to their values and attitudes. It denotes the methods available for converting resources into products or services.

Technological Factors

Managers must be careful about technological factors. Investment decisions must be accurate in new technologies, and they must be adaptable to them.

Technological factors include information technology, the Internet, biotechnology, global transfer of technology, and so forth. None can deny the fact that the pace of change in these technological dimensions is extremely fast.

Technological changes substantially affect a firm’s operations in many ways. The advancement of industrialization in any Country depends mostly on the technological environment. Technology has major impacts on product development , manufacturing efficiencies, and potential competition.

Business organizations facing changing technology problems are always more difficult than those with stable technologies.

The effects of technological changes occur primarily through new products, processes, and materials. An entire industry may be transformed or revitalized due to new technology.

Strategy formulation is linked to technological changes. An intelligent response to the ever-increasing technological advances should be entrepreneurial rather than reactive.

Strategic managers need to monitor developments in technology for their particular industry when formulating a strategy . A quick and thorough study of technological changes; helps managers achieve a higher market share because of the early adoption of new technology.

A firm must be aware of technological changes to avoid obsolescence arid promote innovation. It means that strategy managers of an organization must be adept in – technological forecasting.

Legal Factors

The legal environment consists of laws and regulatory frameworks in a country. Many laws regulate the business operations of enterprises, such as the Factories Act, Industrial Relations Ordinance, the Contract Act, and the Company law, just to name a few.

Business laws protect companies from unfair competition and consumers from unfair business practices.

Business laws also protect society at large. The laws regarding a merger, acquisitions , industry regulation, employment conditions, unionization, workmen’s compensation, and the like affect a firm’s strategy.

Even globalization has caused significant repercussions in the legal environment. Thus, business managers must thoroughly know the major laws that protect business enterprises, consumers, and society.

And the overall situation of law implementation and justice in a country indicates that there is a favorable situation in business in a country.

Environmental / Natural Factors

Strategy-makers need to analyze the trends in the natural environment of the country where it is operating their business.

The most pertinent issues in the natural environment that strategy-makers should consider include the availability of raw materials and other inputs, changes in the cost of energy, levels of environmental pollution, and the changing role of government ‘in environmental protection.

Changes in the physical/natural environment, such as global warming, will heavily affect our daily lives and the functioning of our organizations with various consequences.

Demographic Factors

The demographic environment is concerned with a country’s population.

Specifically, it is related to the population’s size, age structure, geographic distribution, ethnic mix, and income distribution.

With over 8 billion population, demographic changes are evident worldwide. There is negative population growth in some countries, and in some countries, couples are averaging fewer than two children. In general, the average age is increasing.

In many countries, rural-urban migration is rampant. These trends suggest numerous opportunities for firms to develop products and services to meet the needs of diversified groups of people in society.

Strategy-makers must analyze the demographic issues, especially the size and growth rate of the population, age distribution, ethnic mix, educational level, household patterns, and inter-regional movements.

International Factors

Virtually every organization is affected by international factors. It refers to the degree to which an organization is involved in or affected by businesses in other countries.

The global society concept has brought all the nations together, and modern network of communication and transportation technology, almost every part of the world is connected.

General external environmental factors are interrelated with organizational success.

Therefore, strategy-makers need to analyze them in an interrelated fashion to understand and visualize the ‘whole of the environment.

Industry/Task Environment of Organization – Industry Factors that are Vital for Business Functions

A business firm’s strategy is affected by the structural characteristics of the industry , it is thus considered essential for a firm to make an elaborate analysis of the industry in which the firm operates its business.

Based on Michael Porter’s research results, the Van industry structure consists of suppliers, buyers, direct competitors, new entrants, and substitutes. The strategy-makers of a firm need to be concerned with the impact of the industry structure on the firm’s strategy .

Once the external environmental analysis has been completed, they should embark upon industry analysis. Industry analysis helps them have clear information about what is happening in the industry in which their companies are operating their businesses.

Since the industry contains competition, its analysis brings to light the complexities of the competition and the consequent challenges facing the industry.

The industry environmental factors, on the other hand, are those factors in the external environment that specifically reside in a particular industry and affect competition, such as suppliers, customers, competitors, and substitute products.

The task environment consists of factors that directly affect and is affected by the organization’s operations. These factors include suppliers, customers, competitors, regulators, and so on.

A manager can identify environmental factors of specific interest rather than having to deal with a more abstract dimension of the general environment.

6 Elements of the Industry or Task environment

As a manager or entrepreneur , you should be able to identify the various elements of the industry environment so that you can take appropriate steps to respond to them effectively in order to survive in the industry.

6 elements of the task environment for an organization are;

Suppliers are the providers of production or service materials. Dealing with suppliers is an important task of management.

A good relationship between the organization and the suppliers is important for an organization to keep a steady following of quality input materials. Suppliers are sources of resources such as raw materials, components, equipment, financial support, services, and Office Supplies.

To ensure a company’s long-term survival and growth, it is essential to develop a dependable relationship between a business firm and its suppliers. Concerning its competitive position with suppliers, a company should address the following questions;

• Are the suppliers’ prices competitive?
• Do suppliers offer attractive quantity discounts?
• How costly are their shipping charges?
• Are vendors competitive in terms of production standards?
• Are suppliers’ abilities , reputation, and services competitive?
• Are suppliers reciprocally dependent on the firm?

Customers & Buyers

“Satisfaction of customer”- the primary goal of every organization. The customer pays money for the organization’s product or services. They are the peoples who hand them the profit that the companies are targeting .

Managers should pay close attention to the customers’ dimension of the task environment because its customers purchase what keeps a company alive and sound. Strategy managers must understand the composition of the company’s customers .

With this end in view, they need to develop an exhaustive customer profile of the present and potential customers. Managers will be in a better position to pragmatically plan the firm’s strategic operations, anticipate changes in the size of the markets, and anticipate demand patterns.

While constructing a customer profile, managers need to use information regarding customers’ geographic location, demographic characteristics, psychographic issues, and buyer behavior.

Competitors & New Entrants.

The competitors often influence the policies of the organization. Competitive marketplace companies are always trying to stay and go further ahead of their competitors.

In the current world economy, competition and competitors in all respects have increased tremendously. A firm needs to analyze the competitive intensity in the industry. It needs to understand its competitive position in the industry to improve its chance of designing winning strategies .

Many companies develop a ‘competitor profile’ to accurately forecast their short-and-long-term growth and profit potentials.

A competitor profile may include such variables as market share, product line , the effectiveness of sales distribution, price competitiveness, advertising and promotion effectiveness, location, and age of the facility, production capacity, raw material costs, financial position, etc.

This positive effect is that the customers always have options, and the quality of products goes high.

The new entrants are the upcoming competitors of the firm. They are potential competitors because the competitive intensity increases when they enter the industry with similar products.

Regulators are units in the task environment that have the authority to control, regulate or influence an organization’s policies and practices.

Government agencies are the main player in the environment, and interest groups are created by their members to attempt to influence organizations as well as the government. Trade unions and the chamber of commerce are common examples of interest groups.

Substitute Products

The producers of substitute products are indirect competitors.

Substitute products serve the same categories of customers. They can meet the similar needs of customers and, therefore, emerge as threats.

For example, when the detergent powder is capable of meeting customer needs in a much better way, or even in the same way as the laundry soap does, the detergent powder becomes a strong indirect competitor of laundry soap.

Strategic Partners

They are the organization and individuals with whom the organization is to an agreement or understanding for the benefit of the organization. These strategic partners, in some way, influence the organization’s activities in various ways.

The industry environment is the competitive environment of a business organization. The industry environment substantially affects a firm’s business operations because it is the ‘immediate’ external environment of the firm, also known as the ‘immediate operating environment.’

Every firm operates its business in an industry. Therefore its activities are directly affected by any change in the industry, and therefore its activities are directly affected by any changes in the industry environment.

Changes in the general environment can directly impact any of the factors in the industry environment.

An organization has greater control over the industry’s environmental factors than the general environmental factors.

One point is to be noted that although the industry environment affects all the firms in the industry, in reality, all firms are not affected equally.

Influence of Internal and Environment on Business

Business managers must understand the various facets of the impacts of the external environment.

They need to recognize that the external environment has many aspects that can significantly impact a firm’s operations. They need to undertake an analysis of the environment regularly.

This is particularly important for the reason that developments/changes in the remote environment influence business organizations. They also need to understand the influences of changes in the industry environment.

Managers are benefited in several ways when they have a deep understanding and appreciation of the impact of environmental factors on business:

• Knowledge of the environment helps managers identify the direction in which they should proceed. They will travel along with a distinct way of changing direction whenever necessary. Without an understanding of the environment, managers are like a bicycle without a handlebar – no way of maneuvering while riding on a street.
• Managers can isolate those factors, especially in the external environment, which are of specific interest to the organization.
• Managers can take preparation to deal with a predicted crisis in any of the factors in the environment. They can develop crisis plans for overcoming crises that affect an organization.
• The key to achieving organizational effectiveness is understanding of the environment in which the firm operates its No knowledge or inadequate knowledge is very likely to lead managers to ineffectiveness because of ‘running on the wrong road for reaching the goals.

A manager must clearly understand the environment, irrespective of its external or internal nature.

Normally, you would not go for a walk in the rain without an umbrella, because you understand the environment and know you can get wet when it rains.

Similarly, suppose a manager does not know and understand the organization’s environment. In that case, he or she will definitively get wet or dry, and the organization is also in today’s fast and hyper-moving organizational environment.

Now that we have covered internal and external environment factors of organizational environment; read our materials on fundamentals of management and strategic management .

• 6 Reasons to Study Business Management
• Environmental Analysis: Examining Organizational Environment
• Foreign Trade: Definition, Types of Foreign Trade
• Articles of Association: Difference Between Memorandum and Articles of Association
• Small Business: Characteristics, Strengths, Reasons for Failure in Small Business
• What is a Company? Definition, Characteristics, Advantages, Disadvantages
• Memorandum of Association: Definition, Features, Purpose, Importance
• Functional Areas of Business
• What is Amalgamation? Types of Amalgamation
• Cooperative Society: Definition, Characteristics, Principles, Advantages, Limitations
• Business: Definition, Elements, Functions, Features, Objectives, Importance
• Doctrine of Ultra-Vires
• Private Limited Company: Definition, Advantages, Disadvantages
• 3 Levels of Management in Organizational Hierarchy
• Functional Departmentalization: Advantages and Disadvantages
• Departmentalization of Organization by Process Types
• 6 Barriers to Goal Setting in Organization
• Managerial Skills: 5 Skills Managers MUST HAVE!
• Internal Control System: Definition, Components, Features
• Budgetary Control: Meaning, Objectives, Techniques, Steps
• Functional Authority: Delegation of Functional Authority
• Henri Fayol’s Contribution to Management
• 4 Roles Played by Third Party in Negotiation
• Modern Management Theories: Evolution, Schools, & Approaches
• Goal Setting Theory of Motivation
• Choose Best Alternative in Decision Making
• Expectancy Theory of Motivation – Explained
• Equity Theory of Motivation
• Emerging Industries: Strategies For Emerging Industries
• Fragmented Industry: Strategies For Fragmented Industry
• Evaluating Strategies of Diversified Companies in 8 Steps
• 3 Components for Building a Capable Organization
• Stakeholder Analysis
• Corporate Strategy: Meaning, Implementation, Elements
• Horizontal Integration Strategy
• Late Mover Strategy: Benefits & Key Examples
• Five Forces Model by Porter: Competition and Industry Analysis
• Seven Forces Model by Thompson and Strickland
• Management By Objectives(MBO): Meaning, Steps, Benefits
• Cost Leadership Strategy (Low-Cost Strategy)
• Competitive Strategy: Four Types of Competitive Strategy
• Operation Management: Definition, Importance, Decisions

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Task role vs task execution role in Amazon ECS

Danny Steenman

When you’re using CloudFormation, Terraform, or AWS CDK to deploy Amazon ECS containers with ECS Fargate or EC2.

You might notice that the ECS tasks contain two types of roles, one found in the task definition called the execution role, and the task role can be found in the ECS task that controls the running containers.

In short, ECS task roles allow the containers in your task to assume an IAM role to call AWS APIs without having to use AWS Credentials inside the containers.

This means the application inside the container can access other AWS services like sending a notification to Amazon SNS or accessing an S3 bucket.

ECS task execution roles grant the ECS agents permission to make AWS API calls who are responsible for managing the tasks in the cluster.

This means the task is able to send container logs to CloudWatch or pull a container image from Amazon ECR.

In this blog post, we’ll dive deeper to find out what the differences are between the ECS task role and the ECS task execution role in Amazon ECS.

Table of Contents

What is an Amazon ECS task role?

The ECS task role is essential when the application in your ECS container running on Fargate or EC2 needs to access other AWS Services like an S3 bucket.

When you visit the Amazon ECS service in the AWS Console and pick a task, you should see the task role.

If you click on the task role it will show you the details in the IAM Management console.

There you can see that the task role contains a trust relationship with the "ecs-tasks.amazonaws.com" service.

It allows the containers to assume the role which can then be used to access other AWS Services.

On the permissions tab, you see which permissions policies are attached. These are regularly managed or inline policies.

In the example below we’ve given the task role access to the S3 Service.

What is an Amazon ECS task execution role?

The ECS task execution role grants the Amazon ECS container and Fargate agents permission to make AWS API calls on your behalf.

The ECS agent is responsible for managing the tasks in your ECS cluster and manages all the overhead.

The execution role can be found in the task definition of your ECS task.

To cover to most common use cases, like pulling container images from Amazon ECR and sending container logs to CloudWatch logs you need the following permissions.

In this article, you’ve learned the difference between an Amazon ECS task role and a task execution role.

You need both roles in order to start up containers in your ECS tasks by getting permission to pull the Amazon ECR container image and getting the ability to access other AWS services from within the container.

Related posts

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A Senior AWS Cloud Engineer with over 9 years of experience migrating workloads from on-premises to AWS Cloud.

I have helped companies of all sizes shape their cloud adoption strategies, optimizing operational efficiency, reducing costs, and improving organizational agility.

Connect with me today  to discuss your cloud aspirations, and let’s work together to transform your business by leveraging the power of AWS Cloud.

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Configure user security in an environment

• 11 contributors

Microsoft Dataverse uses a role-based security model to control access to a database and its resources in an environment. Use security roles to configure access to all resources in an environment or to specific apps and data in the environment. A combination of access levels and permissions in a security role determines which apps and data users can view and how they can interact with those apps and data.

An environment can have no or one Dataverse database. You assign security roles differently for environments that have no Dataverse database and environments that have a Dataverse database .

Learn more about environments in Power Platform .

Predefined security roles

Environments include predefined security roles that reflect common user tasks. The predefined security roles follow the security best practice of "minimum required access": provide the least access to the minimum business data that a user needs to use an app. These security roles can be assigned to a user, owner team , and group team . The predefined security roles that are available in an environment depend on the environment type and the apps you have installed in it.

Another set of security roles is assigned to application users . Those security roles are installed by our services and can't be updated.

Environments without a Dataverse database

Environment Maker and Environment Admin are the only predefined roles for environments that have no Dataverse database. These roles are described in the following table.

Environments with a Dataverse database

If the environment has a Dataverse database, a user must be assigned the System Administrator role instead of the Environment Admin role to have full admin privileges.

Users who make apps that connect to the database and need to create or update entities and security roles must have the System Customizer role in addition to the Environment Maker role. The Environment Maker role doesn't have privileges on the environment's data.

The following table describes the predefined security roles in an environment that has a Dataverse database. You can't edit these roles.

In addition to the predefined security roles described for Dataverse, other security roles might be available in your environment depending on the Power Platform components—Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents—you have. The following table provides links to more information.

Dataverse for Teams environments

Learn more about predefined security roles in Dataverse for Teams environments .

App-specific security roles

If you deploy Dynamics 365 apps in your environment, other security roles are added. The following table provides links to more information.

Summary of resources available to predefined security roles

The following table describes which resources each security role can author.

*Connections are used in canvas apps and Power Automate .

**Dataverse for Teams users don't get access to desktop flows by default. You need to upgrade your environment to full Dataverse capabilities and acquire desktop flow license plans to use desktop flows.

Assign security roles to users in an environment that has no Dataverse database

For environments with no Dataverse database, a user who has the Environment Admin role in the environment can assign security roles to individual users or groups from Microsoft Entra ID.

Sign in to the Power Platform admin center .

Select  Environments  > [select an environment].

In the Access tile, select See all for Environment admin or Environment maker to add or remove people for either role.

Select Add people , and then specify the name or email address of one or more users or groups from Microsoft Entra ID.

Select Add .

Assign security roles to users in an environment that has a Dataverse database

Security roles can be assigned to individual users, owner teams , and  Microsoft Entra group teams . Before you assign a role to a user, verify the user's account has been added to and is enabled in the environment .

In general, a security role can only be assigned to users whose accounts are enabled in the environment. To assign a security role to a user account that's disabled in the environment, turn on allowRoleAssignmentOnDisabledUsers in OrgDBOrgSettings.

In the Access tile, select See all under Security roles .

Make sure the correct business unit is selected in the list, and then select a role from the list of roles in the environment.

Create, edit, or copy a security role using the new, modern UI

You can easily create, edit, or copy a security role and customize it to meet your needs.

Go to the Power Platform admin center , select Environments in the navigation pane, and then select an environment.

Select Settings .

Expand Users + Permissions .

Select Security roles .

Complete the appropriate task:

Create a security role

Edit a security role, copy a security role.

Select New role from the command bar.

In the Role Name field, enter a name for the new role.

In the Business unit field, select the business unit the role belongs to.

Select whether team members should inherit the role.

If this setting is enabled and the role is assigned to a team, all team members inherit all the privileges associated with the role.

Select Save .

Define the privileges and properties of the security role .

Either select the role name or select the row and then select Edit. Then define the privileges and properties of the security role .

Some predefined security roles can't be edited . If you try to edit these roles, the Save and Save + Close buttons aren't available.

Select the security role and then select Copy . Give the role a new name. Edit the security role as needed.

Only the privileges are copied, not any assigned members and teams.

Audit security roles

Audit security roles to better understand changes made to security in your Power Platform environment.

Create or configure a custom security role

If your app uses a custom entity, its privileges must be explicitly granted in a security role before your app can be used. You can either add these privileges in an existing security role or create a custom security role.

Every security role must include a minimum set of privileges . Learn more about security roles and privileges .

The environment might maintain records that can be used by multiple apps. You might need multiple security roles that grant different privileges. For example:

• Some users (call them Editors) might only need to read, update, and attach other records, so their security role will have read, write, and append privileges.
• Other users might need all the privileges that Editors have plus the ability to create, append to, delete, and share. The security role for these users will have create, read, write, append, delete, assign, append to, and share privileges.

Create a custom security role with minimum privileges to run an app

Sign in to the Power Platform admin center , select Environments in the navigation pane, and then select an environment.

Select Settings > Users + permissions > Security roles .

Select the App Opener role, and then select Copy .

Enter the name of the custom role, and then select Copy .

In the list of security roles, select the new role, and then select More actions ( … ) > Edit .

In the role editor, select the Custom Entities tab.

Find your custom table in the list, and select the Read , Write , and Append privileges.

Select Save and Close .

Create a custom security role from scratch

Select New role .

Enter the name of the new role on the Details tab.

On the other tabs, find your entity and then select actions and the scope for performing them.

Select a tab, and search for your entity. For example, select the Custom Entities tab to set permissions on a custom entity.

Select the privileges Read , Write , Append .

Minimum privileges to run an app

When you create a custom security role, the role must have a set of minimum privileges for a user to run an app. Learn more about required minimum privileges .

Grant users access Control user access to environments: security groups and licenses How access to a record is determined

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Research: How Different Fields Are Using GenAI to Redefine Roles

• Maryam Alavi

Examples from customer support, management consulting, professional writing, legal analysis, and software and technology.

The interactive, conversational, analytical, and generative features of GenAI offer support for creativity, problem-solving, and processing and digestion of large bodies of information. Therefore, these features can act as cognitive resources for knowledge workers. Moreover, the capabilities of GenAI can mitigate various hindrances to effective performance that knowledge workers may encounter in their jobs, including time pressure, gaps in knowledge and skills, and negative feelings (such as boredom stemming from repetitive tasks or frustration arising from interactions with dissatisfied customers). Empirical research and field observations have already begun to reveal the value of GenAI capabilities and their potential for job crafting.

There is an expectation that implementing new and emerging Generative AI (GenAI) tools enhances the effectiveness and competitiveness of organizations. This belief is evidenced by current and planned investments in GenAI tools, especially by firms in knowledge-intensive industries such as finance, healthcare, and entertainment, among others. According to forecasts, enterprise spending on GenAI will increase by two-fold in 2024 and grow to $151.1 billion by 2027 .

• Maryam Alavi is the Elizabeth D. & Thomas M. Holder Chair & Professor of IT Management, Scheller College of Business, Georgia Institute of Technology .

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• IFC India 2024 - Development While Decarbonizing: India’s Path to Net Zero
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• 21 Mar 2024

IFC India: Renewable Energy - CleanMax

Professor Vikram Gandhi’s Immersive Field Course (IFC) “Development while Decarbonizing: India’s Path to Net-Zero" delved into the critical aspect of decarbonization and sustainability goals amid India's rapid development. The course presented an opportunity for students to advance their knowledge of sustainability efforts, decarbonization, and net zero in the context of a broader development agenda. The class culminated in a series of site visits in January 2024 in Mumbai and Bangalore and this is one of 14 student essays that highlights their reflections on uncovering sustainable solutions across the country.

During the “IFC: Immersive Field Course,” HBS students had the opportunity to visit the site of a rooftop solar facility in Bangalore, India. The solar site is deployed and managed by CleanMax, the largest B2B provider of renewable energy to commercial and industrial customers in India. As part of the course, we were tasked with researching the state of renewable energy - specifically solar and wind - development in India. Companies like CleanMax play a critical role in pushing deployment of clean energy in the country.

Headquartered in Mumbai, CleanMax offers a range of services, including rooftop solar installations, project commissioning, and asset management to over 350 corporate companies across various industries. Founded in 2011 by Kuldeep Jain and Sushant Arora, the company has grown tremendously since then and taken on financing from global investors like Brookfield Asset Management and the International Finance Corporation (IFC). In 2017, the firm expanded operations beyond India into the UAE and Thailand.

CleanMax initially entered the renewable energy space by pioneering the “Energy Sale” model in India. This model, also known as the “OPEX” model, shifts the performance risk of renewables from the corporations to CleanMax, allowing customers to pay only for energy consumed without upfront asset investment, thus saving customers 20-40%. The founders, Kuldeep Jain and Anand Shah, realized corporations were seeking cost efficient ways to reduce their environmental footprint while simultaneously the cost of solar energy was decreasing.

There are several key accomplishments under CleanMax’s belt, including 1.6 GW installed solar and wind capacity globally and over 550 completed rooftop solar installations. CleanMax has played an integral role in India’s transition to renewables and received many awards. CleanMax was the first Indian company to win the prestigious Transformational Business Awards 2018 by Financial Times (FT) and International Finance Corporation (IFC) in Achievement in the “Transformational Infrastructure” category. They are committed to being the sustainability partner of choice for private users by helping customers meet 100% of their energy needs through renewable energy.

The site visit started off in a modern office setting with a presentation from CleanMax leadership on the energy sector in India and their particular business model. The team shared several key statistics on the state of renewable energy in India, pointing out that roughly 20% of India’s electricity consumption today comes from renewable energy sources while the country’s goal is to have 50% of electricity consumption powered by clean sources by 2030. CleanMax executives shared that solar is cheaper than grid electricity in all cases in India, regardless of geography and use-case. Despite this fact, India is continuing to deploy new fossil fuel power generation, largely because of (a) the tremendous energy demand forecasts of the country and (b) inadequacies in grid infrastructure and energy storage.

After the office presentation, we drove about an hour away to the solar site. The site was a factory of an automobile parts manufacturer. The manufacturing company is a customer of CleanMax and pays CleanMax a recurring fee for the solar energy generated on the roof of its factory. The solar system was separated into three sections on various rooftops of the factory and rated at a power capacity of 240 kW. At the site, we were met by the CleanMax asset manager tasked with managing the operations of this solar site. We followed him up three flights of stairs to the roof of the factory where the solar panels were situated (pictured below). The whole system felt modern, clean, and well-maintained. The CleanMax employees gave an overview of the site, explained the various parts of the site (the modules, the inverters), and answered a barrage of questions from inquisitive MBA students.

From an operations and maintenance perspective, we learned that CleanMax performs three solar module cleanings per month to ensure optimal performance of its solar site. On other sites they perform four to five cleanings a month, dependent on the level of soiling and dusting on the location. They separate their maintenance activities into reactive, preventative, and predictive maintenance.

Students learned that India’s power distribution companies (DISCOMs) cap the solar capacity of sites like the one we visited to 85% of the demand of the facility. This is to ensure that some percentage of electricity purchased by the facility comes from the DISCOM. This sparked conversation amongst students on the role of DISCOMs in the energy transition – are policies like these helping or hurting the clean energy transition? Another key topic of discussion during the site visit (and really a theme throughout the IFC course) was the supply chain dependence on China and associated geopolitical risk. India’s solar industry is currently heavily reliant on Chinese solar modules with domestically produced Indian modules over 40% more expensive than Chinese modules. With more protectionist policies potentially being imposed by the Indian government, will Indian solar companies be able to meet its deployment goals without the use of Chinese solar modules? Will Indian solar module manufacturers be able to bring its costs down quickly enough for India to transition its energy system to clean power?

As a team, two of us (Alliyah and Rory) are newer to the world of climate and one of us (Adam) has long been passionate about the climate issue and the energy transition. We all found the site visit to CleanMax to be a special experience. Adam had been to solar sites before but not one in a country like India. The challenges they face are unique, but given the successful track record to date and the level of expertise the team seems to have, we left the site inspired and optimistic about the impact companies like CleanMax will have in decarbonizing India’s future.

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Red Hill task force passes environmental defueling inspection

The task force assigned to oversee defueling operations of the controversial Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility passed an inspection by the Environmental Protection Agency, according to a letter from the agency .

An EPA enforcement and compliance official sent a letter to the commander of Joint Task Force-Red Hill, Vice Adm. John Wade, where the official noted that the task force had met the 11 criteria listed in the defueling plan in order to transfer the responsibilities of closing the site to Navy Closure Task Force-Red Hill.

“EPA commends the JTF-RH for the removal of a vast majority of the fuel stored within the RHBFSF upon establishment of the task force,” said Jamie Marincola, the acting deputy director of the Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Division. “We look forward to a seamless transition as responsibility for final fuel removal activities shifts to the NCTF-RH.”

Marincola did note that the defueling is not complete, but that the Defense Department and Defensive Logistics Agency have developed a plan for Navy Closure Task Force-Red Hill.

The responsibilities for the Navy Closure Task Force-Red Hill include removing all fuel and “fuel-derived waste,” along with sludge material that has accumulated at the bottom of the tank, according to the letter. Some of the remaining fuel at the bottom of the tank may need to be removed “by destructive means,” but Marincola did not elaborate further.

In October, the EPA approved the Defense Department to begin defueling the Hawaii storage facility at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam , nearly two years after a spill leaked into a water well that serves more than 90,000 people. Navy officials had initially said the water was safe to drink, even as residents around Pearl Harbor reported that their drinking water smelled like fuel.

Nearly 6,000 personnel — including many military families — sought out medical care for rashes, sores, nausea and other ailments after being exposed to the water.

As of June 2023, nearly 1,500 people had filed an administrative claim against the Navy, along with a pending federal lawsuit with 300 plaintiffs.

Zamone “Z” Perez is a rapid response reporter and podcast producer at Defense News and Military Times. He previously worked at Foreign Policy and Ufahamu Africa. He is a graduate of Northwestern University, where he researched international ethics and atrocity prevention in his thesis. He can be found on Twitter @zamoneperez.

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The behavior of ant queens is shaped by their social environment

The queens in colonies of social insects, such as ants, bees, and wasps, are considered the veritable embodiment of specialization in the animal kingdom. The common perception is that the queen's only task is to lay eggs -- and that this attribute is an inherent trait, not influenced by external factors. In contrast, recent research undertaken at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has demonstrated that in certain ant colonies the social environment can play a crucial role in shaping the behavioral specialization of the queens. "With regard to the ant species we studied, it is social factors that control whether queens become specialized or not. Our findings challenge the widely accepted notion of social insect queens as inherently specialized egg-laying machines," stated Dr. Romain Libbrecht.

The research was conducted by the Reproduction, Nutrition, and Behavior in Insect Societies group at JGU under the supervision of Dr. Romain Libbrecht, an evolutionary biologist. The corresponding paper has recently been published in Functional Ecology . Dr. Romain Libbrecht currently works at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in the Insect Biology Research Institute of the University of Tours.

Concept of insect societies as superorganisms consisting of specialized individuals

It is generally assumed that social insect colonies consist of queens that monopolize reproduction and sterile workers responsible for all non-reproduction-related tasks, such as the care of the brood, i.e., eggs and larvae. Libbrecht's team now questioned this basic assumption. They focused on ant species where the queens found new colonies alone and without the help of workers. "Interestingly, these founding queens are not yet specialized in terms of their behavior at this stage of their lives," Libbrecht pointed out. "They themselves assume all tasks in the nest, such as brood care, to ensure successful production of the first generation of workers."

In their experiments, Libbrecht's group studied the black garden ant Lasius niger that is native to Germany. They found the social environment to be a core factor in determining the behavioral specialization of founding queens. "The introduction of workers in the nests of founding queens suppressed the natural predisposition of the queens to look after their brood themselves. And, conversely, when we isolated queens specialized in egg-laying from their workers, they rapidly reverted to the brood care behavior observed in the case of founding queens, even after many years of specialization."

Revision of the accepted view of the division of labor in insect societies

Libbrecht emphasized that the behavior observed during the study challenges the traditional view of social insect queens as being intrinsically specialized in egg production. Instead, the findings demonstrate that the presence of workers not only triggers the egg-laying specialization of queens but also actively maintains it in established colonies. The discovery of such social control of queen specialization may reshape our understanding of the functioning of insect societies and their division of labor.

Romain Libbrecht was head of the Reproduction, Nutrition, and Behavior in Insect Societies group at the Institute of Organismic and Molecular Evolution (IOME) at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz from 2016 to 2022. Since 2023, he has been a researcher at the Insect Biology Research Institute at the CNRS of the University of Tours. He is particularly interested in examining how organisms adjust their reproduction, physiology, and behavior in response to environmental conditions.

• Insects (including Butterflies)
• Mating and Breeding
• Behavioral Science
• Evolutionary Biology
• Environmental Awareness
• Exotic Species
• Environmental Policy
• Africanized bee
• Characteristics of common wasps and bees
• Sociobiology
• Egg (biology)

Story Source:

Materials provided by Johannes Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz . Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

• Vahideh Majidifar, Marina N. Psalti, Martin Coulm, Ebru Fetzer, Eva‐Maria Teggers, Frederik Rotering, Judith Grünewald, Luca Mannella, Maxi Reuter, Dennis Unte, Romain Libbrecht. Ontogeny of superorganisms: Social control of queen specialization in ants . Functional Ecology , 2024; DOI: 10.1111/1365-2435.14536

Cite This Page :

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4 Takeaways From the Abortion Pill Arguments

Several justices questioned the remedy of applying nationwide restrictions to mifepristone because it would be the first time a court had second-guessed the F.D.A.’s expert judgment on a drug.

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By Pam Belluck

• March 26, 2024

A majority of the Supreme Court seemed inclined on Tuesday to reject a bid to sharply limit access to abortion pills.

During about 90 minutes of argument, most of the justices seemed doubtful that the plaintiffs, who do not prescribe abortion pills or regularly treat abortion patients, even had standing to bring the challenge . The justices, including several in the conservative majority, questioned whether the plaintiffs could show that they faced the moral harm they claimed to suffer from the availability of the pill, mifepristone.

The case centers on whether changes the Food and Drug Administration made in 2016 and 2021, which broadened access to the drug, would have to be rolled back.

Those changes made it possible for patients to obtain prescriptions for mifepristone by telemedicine and receive abortion pills in the mail, which has greatly increased the availability of medication abortion.

Several justices questioned the remedy the plaintiffs seek: to apply nationwide restrictions to the drug in a case that would have very broad implications because it would be the first time a court had second-guessed the F.D.A.’s expert judgment about drug safety.

“This case seems like a prime example of turning what could be a small lawsuit into a nationwide legislative assembly on an F.D.A. rule or any other federal government action,” said Justice Neil Gorsuch, an appointee of President Donald J. Trump.

Here are some takeaways:

The plaintiffs’ claims of being entitled to sue were met with great skepticism.

To have standing, plaintiffs must show they face concrete harm from the policy or action they are challenging in court. In this case, the plaintiffs, a group of anti-abortion doctors and organizations, say they face moral harm because patients who take abortion pills might seek treatment afterward at emergency departments in hospitals where some of those doctors work.

Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar, arguing for the government, said the plaintiffs did not “come within 100 miles of the kinds of circumstances this court has previously identified” as grounds for standing. She cited the fact that the doctors do not prescribe abortion pills and are not forced to treat women who take abortion pills. More crucially, she pointed to the fact that because serious complications from abortion pills are very rare, these doctors would not often encounter a woman who had experienced a serious complication requiring them to provide treatment.

The plaintiffs’ lawyer, Erin Hawley, countered by saying the doctors had treated abortion pill patients in emergency departments. She cited the written declarations in the case of Dr. Christina Francis and Dr. Ingrid Skop.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett questioned whether those doctors had provided examples of “actually participating in the abortion to end the life of the embryo or fetus.” She added, “I don’t read either Skop or Francis to say that they ever participated in that.”

The justices also questioned whether the anti-abortion organizations in the case have standing. Those organizations contend that they experience harm because in order to challenge the abortion pill, they have had to divert resources from other advocacy efforts.

Justice Clarence Thomas seemed skeptical of that claim, saying that having to prioritize how an organization spends its time and money would apply to “anyone who is aggressive or vigilant about bringing lawsuits. Just simply by using resources to advocate their position in court, you say now, causes an injury. That seems easy to manufacture.”

There was a lot of discussion about conscience protections.

Federal conscience protections allow doctors and other health care providers to opt out of providing care that they object to on moral or religious grounds. In many hospitals, doctors register their conscience objections in advance so they are never called upon to participate in care they object to.

Lawyers for the government and for a manufacturer of mifepristone, Danco Laboratories, said that if the anti-abortion doctors did encounter an abortion patient, they could easily invoke conscience protections and pass the case to another doctor who did not have moral objections. The plaintiffs are “individuals who do not use this product, do not prescribe this product and have a conscience right not to treat anyone who has taken this product,” said Jessica Ellsworth, a lawyer representing Danco.

Ms. Hawley said there were sometimes occasions in emergency departments where the plaintiffs would not have time to opt out, forcing them to “choose between helping a woman with a life-threatening condition and violating their conscience.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said there was “a mismatch” between what the anti-abortion doctors are claiming they have experienced and the remedy they are seeking. “The obvious common-sense remedy would be to provide them with an exemption, that they don’t have to participate in this procedure,” Justice Jackson said.

Noting that such a remedy already exists in the form of conscience protections, she said: “I guess, then, what they’re asking for in this lawsuit is more than that. They’re saying, ‘Because we object to having to be forced to participate in this procedure, we’re seeking an order preventing anyone from having access to these drugs at all. ”

Justice Barrett asked about the plaintiffs’ claim that the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA, which requires emergency departments in hospitals to treat patients with urgent medical issues, would override doctors’ conscience objections and force them to treat patients who have taken abortion pills anyway. Ms. Prelogar said that would not happen because EMTALA applies to hospitals, not individual doctors, so doctors with moral objections could opt out.

The case could affect the government’s role in regulating drugs — and possibly in regulating anything.

Many experts on regulatory policy and leaders in the pharmaceutical industry have said that if the court decides to undermine the scientific expertise of the F.D.A. , it would deter companies from developing new medications and would ultimately hurt patients who would not have those medications available. They say it could also shake the regulatory authority of other government agencies.

Several justices asked about this issue. “Do you have concerns about judges parsing medical and scientific studies?” Justice Jackson asked Ms. Ellsworth, the lawyer for the manufacturer. Ms. Ellsworth said that was a concern, noting that two studies the plaintiffs had cited to show mifepristone was unsafe had been recently retracted .

“That is why FDA has many hundreds of pages of analysis in the record of what the scientific data showed,” Ms. Ellsworth said. “And courts are just not in a position to parse through and second-guess that.

A 19th-century anti-vice law made an appearance.

The Comstock Act, enacted in 1873, bars the mailing of drugs that can be used to terminate pregnancies.

Justices Alito and Thomas asked whether the act, which has not been used in decades and has been narrowed by the courts and Congress, applied, as the plaintiffs claim.

“The Comstock provisions don’t fall within F.D.A.’s lane,” said Ms. Prelogar, who said that the F.D.A.’s responsibility was to determine the safety and effectiveness of drugs and to regulate them. She also pointed out that the Justice Department issued an opinion that the Comstock Act applied only if the sender intended for the recipient of the materials to “use them unlawfully.”

Ms. Ellsworth warned of what might ensue should the court decide the act applied. “I think this court should think hard about the mischief it would invite if it allowed agencies to start taking action based on statutory responsibilities that Congress has assigned to other agencies,” she said.

Pam Belluck is a health and science reporter, covering a range of subjects, including reproductive health, long Covid, brain science, neurological disorders, mental health and genetics. More about Pam Belluck