What happens to teamwork during extended periods of isolation and confinement?
While that sounds like a question tailored for much of today’s housebound workforce, it’s actually a research topic that professors Noshir Contractor and Leslie DeChurch have studied in an entirely different context: space travel.
The researchers never thought “that we would be drawing conclusions from space teams to our teams here on Earth,” DeChurch says.
But they did just that during a recent webinar from Kellogg Executive Education. Contractor, a professor of management and organizations at Kellogg, and DeChurch, a professor in Northwestern’s School of Communication, discussed their research with NASA, and shared some insights that workers and leaders can use to help remote teams function cohesively.