Sleep Deprivation and Group Performance

I just read a most instructive academic article called "Sleep Deprivation and Decision-Making Teams: Burning the Midnight Oil or Playing with Fire?"  It was written by Christopher Barnes and John Hollenbeck and published earlier this year in the Academy of Management Review (Volume 34: 56-66).

The authors start with the astute observation that although a large body of research shows that individual sleep deprivation has consistently negative effects on performance and interpersonal relations, the impact on group performance has hardly been studied.  They point out that some of these negative individual effects -- reduced ability to process information, reduced ability to learn and perform novel tasks, irritability, and impatience -- can disrupt team performance in all sorts of ways. They point out, for example, that some of the worst accidents in history were caused by errors that teams made between 2:00 AM and 4:00 AM, a time when people are especially likely to be sleep deprived,  Examples include the mishaps at Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island. They also report that widespread sleep deprivation was identified as a contributing factor to the errors and poor judgments leading up to the explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle.

The article then goes on to describe various ways in which groups can magnify or dampen the effects of sleep deprived members.  I was especially interested in their argument that when a team has a very hierarchical structure (in other words, is led by a "my way. or the highway" boss), that when the boss is sleep deprived, the rest of the team will have a hard time overcoming his or her errors. Indeed, if you think about some of the effects they describe, if you already have an authoritarian boss, sleep deprivation will make things even worse because he or she will have a harder time processing opposing arguments and be more likely to snap at members who openly disagree.  Another factor they touched on, and I think is worth developing more, is that when people on a team are sleep deprived -- regardless of their personalities -- the resulting irritability and grumpiness is likely (regardless of personality) to cause the kind of nasty interpersonal conflict associated with poor performance and decision-making -- as I have written here before, the best teams have people that fight as if they are right and listen as if they are wrong. Listening as if you are wrong is really tough when you haven't had a good night's sleep in weeks.

Finally, this paper also helped me understand why people in Silicon Valley start-ups are often so grumpy and interpersonally insensitive.  If you wanted to create a recipe for breeding and spreading asshole poisoning, we may have invented the perfect system around here -- take a bunch of people who encourage (and often require) one another to suffer from sleep deprivation for weeks and months on end, force them work very closely together, and then add a big dash performance pressure.  The research cited by Barnes and Hollenbeck, and other research on group effectiveness as well, suggests that this is nearly perfect way to create grumpiness, nastiness, and finger-pointing. It also suggests, most interestingly, that it is also an effective way to dampen creativity.  Plenty of creative work has been done by sleep-deprived teams around here.  But this all makes me wonder, has this happened DESPITE all that fatigue?  As the authors of this intriguing paper suggest, a lot more research is needed on sleep deprivation and team performance, but it is fascinating topic.

Comments

[Chris Yeh]

Having taken Bill Dement's class while an undergrad at Stanford, I've always been aware of the need for sleep.

My theory is that we all have a baseline level of resilience that gets drained by hassles and problems, and recharged by positive events and people.

Not getting enough sleep drains your resilience before the day even begins, which means you're starting out with an empty tank.

I think the old Russian folktale said it best..."The morning is wiser than the evening."

[Michael F. Martin]

Once within the last couple of years TechCrunch ran a piece about how using drugs like Modafanil might be the future for entrepreneurs in the valley. I threw up in my mouth a little at that one. There is a kind of machismo to the face time in startups that is ridiculous.