Does teaming up make you less vulnerable to task interruption?

Omnipresent in everyday multitasking environments task interruptions are usually detrimental to individual performance. Here, we examined whether teaming up renders an individual less vulnerable to interruptions in complex and dynamic situations. We employed a microworld to simulate command and control in a crisis management situation and to examine the relative impact of interruptions on operators working in a functional dyad versus operators working alone. While task interruption was detrimental to efficacy in supervisory control of both single and team interrupted operators, the latter were less vulnerable than the former. However, teaming up did not translate into faster resumption time, a consequence of the overhead attributable to coordination and communication requirements of collaborative work. These findings suggest that in complex and dynamic environments working in a small team confers more resistance to task interruption than working alone and speed of interruption recovery is no guarantee of quality of recovery.