Time Pressure, Performance, and Awareness of Group Members in Co-acting Groups

Karau and Kelly (1992) propose a resource allocation model of group performance under time pressure. Their model borrows from the attentional focus ideas of Easterbrook (1959), in that it includes attention as a resource, but is more general, in that it includes other resources as well. As time pressure increases, the group allocates more resources to task-relevant activities and pays less attention to lower relevance cues. This would initially improve performance by leading the group to ignore distracters and avoid time-wasting activities, but eventually it would reduce performance as the group narrows its focus of attention too far (causing them to miss task relevant cues) or fails to engage in social activities necessary for group coordination. The current study explores the possibility that this focusing leads group members to lose awareness of each other as time pressure increases, and discusses the implications for group coordination and performance. Introduction The modern world is a complex place in which time pressure has become a fact of life. Many of the tasks that must be performed require the processing of enormous amounts of information in very short periods of time. Imagine managing a multinational computer corporation. The decision on the table involves where to build a new factory to produce a new, faster microchip. To make the best decision, the laws of the various candidate nations, market countries, and those of the multinational firm’s home office must be taken into account, as well as the nuances of doing business in all those countries. With the accelerated rate of technological development, every day spent making the decision brings the microchip one day closer to obsolescence. No one individual can manage so much information. One common alternative is to use a group of people to perform complex, time-pressured tasks. For groups to be successful, they must maintain coordination (Steiner, 1972). To do this, group members need to be aware of each other’s abilities and distribute responsibilities accordingly (Libby, Trotman, & Zimmer, 1987; Littlepage & Silbiger, 1992). A large body of research exists suggesting that stressors in general lead to a narrowing of attentional focus (Bacon, 1974; Cohen, 1978; Furst & Tennenbaum, 1985), and work in individual decision-making suggests that this effect also occurs with time pressure specifically (Edland & Svenson, 1993; Wright, 1974). Karau and Kelly (1992) extend these findings to the group level. As time pressure increases, "the group" itself starts to ignore cues that have low relevance to the task and focus its attention on cues with higher task relevance. Similarly, groups engage in fewer social activities and engage in more on-task activities. At first, ignoring low-relevance cues improves performance, as does reducing the amount of social activities. Eventually, the group’s focus of attention narrows too far, and it starts to miss relevant cues. Similarly, the group may cease to engage in "social" activities that actually serve group coordination functions. Either way, this over-focusing at high levels of time pressure would hurt performance. Karau and Kelly (1992) found both an inverted-U pattern of performance and a decrease in social interaction as time pressure increased. However, they manipulated time pressure as time allowed for the task. As the time grows shorter, the task grows inherently more difficult, thus confounding time pressure and difficulty. The extent to which their measure of performance controlled for this is unclear. It is also possible that this performance effect is a result of the aggregation of individuals demonstrating an inverted-U pattern under time pressure. The social interaction results of Karau and Kelly (1992) suggest two possibilities. First, group members simply have less time to engage in social activity under time pressure but do not lose awareness of each other. The more interesting possibility is that, as time pressure increases, participants lose awareness of their fellow group members. In other words, the typical finding regarding awareness of non-social objects extends to social objects as well. This would be expected if the reduction in group performance at high levels of time pressure really is due to group coordination problems. Karau and Kelly established that groups under time pressure engage in less social activity. The present study makes no attempt to refute this; it’s intent is to determine what caused this effect. Specifically, the present study explores the possibility that this effect is symptomatic of a general loss of awareness of other group members.