Role Changes During Long-Term Missions an Anecdotal Assessment

摘要

One of the most importnat pieces of information to be consistently revealed by anecdotal materal regarding small-group isolation is the way in which roles. including leadership responsibilities, expectations, and communications, change during the course of the mission. Intuition suggests that this may be increasingly true for long-term missions. Such changes can have drastic implications for task completion, interpersonal professional interactions and, inevitably, the safety and potential success or failure of the mission. These changes appear to be further exacerebated among multi-cultural, multi-national, and multi-gender teams, but seem to be mitigated somewhat among teams representign diverse ages. Given the anecdotal material available, intuition suggests that leadership and teamsmanship training must take on new forms and, further, that such training is likely to be critical to the success of any longterm space-based activities.