Sleep deprivation impairs team performance and cohesion

Teams that work together across location, time, and organization are known as "distributed teams." These teams often work in demanding environments that are stressful and fatiguing due to extended periods of wakefulness, intense work, and working during night hours. The aim of this study was to examine the impact of prolonged wakefulness on team performance and cohesion.

N = 22 healthy young individuals (M = 22.60, SD = 4.41 years, 11f) participated in a 5-day laboratory study with 62 h of wakefulness. Throughout the sleep deprivation period, four-person distributed teams completed the Capturing Objective Human Econometric Social Interactions in Organizations and Networks (COHESION) team task while physically isolated from one another. This task assessed cooperation, productivity, individual performance, team performance, and team dynamics. Fatigue and self-reported measures of team cohesion were also administered.

There were statistically significant changes in team member cooperation and team dynamics across the sleep deprivation period (p < .05, ƞp2 > 0.14), with steep declines in cooperation and team dynamics after 21 h of prior wake. There were statistically significant productivity, team performance, and team cohesion over the sleep deprivation period (p < .05, ƞp2 > 0.14), with deficits after 36 h of wake.

Team members acted more selfishly than cooperatively after 21 h of total sleep deprivation, resulting in poorer team dynamics. Distributed team members were no longer able to engage effectively with their teams after 36 h of total sleep deprivation due to fatigue, which was associated with poorer distributed team performance and cohesion. These findings show impairments for distributed teams who operate with severe fatigue in safety-critical working environments.