Final Report - Developing affect regulation strategies to prevent collective team collapse (DFG reference number: WE 6920/1-1; Project number: 460447311)

Collective Team Collapse describes the sudden, unexpected, and extreme collective performance collapse of a sport team during an important game or competition. A team collapse is typically triggered by a critical event, such as mistakes in the own team, the performance collapse of a key player, or referee decisions (Wergin et al., 2018, 2019). This project investigated individual and interpersonal emotion regulation as potential strategies for the prevention of collective team collapse. A first qualitative study showed that sport teams used other and less effective emotion regulation strategies when experiencing a team collapse after a critical event compared to when they were able to recover their performance after a critical event. Less effective emotion regulation strategies included suppressing emotions and expressing unhelpful emotions on an individual level and blaming each other and interacting less on an interpersonal level, while effective strategies for example included accepting mistakes and perspective taking on an individual and communicating confidence and emotional role modelling on an interpersonal level. Some teams seemed to experience an emotional shutdown in team collapse situations as well as a tendency to avoid emotion regulation in these situations. These results were confirmed in a second quantitative study, which also showed that ineffective emotion regulation strategies, such as suppressing or expressing negative emotions, are experienced as more effortful and depleting compared to effective strategies. A third experimental study showed that positive and negative interpersonal emotion regulation strategies impacted team performance, whereby teams that applied positive strategies performed significantly better, especially when experiencing a critical event, compared to teams that applied ineffective or no strategies. These findings offer initial insights into potential interventions for collective team collapse. Individual and interpersonal emotion regulation strategies constitute a promising approach to mitigate against a developing team collapse. Based on these results, intervention programs for sport teams as well as for coaches and applied sport psychologists can be developed. Furthermore, the results are applicable to teams in other organisations. Considering that ineffective team performance causes a loss of 7 trillion US-dollars per year (10% of the world’s GDP; Pendell, 2023), the results of this project can significantly contribute to improving team performance in a variety of contexts.