Association between person-unique individual behavior styles and the quality and reliability of operator’s professional performance

Abstract

Among the prioritized objective of maintaining psychophysiological safety in extended space missions is the buildup of crew professional reliability. Reliability of operator's performance hinges as on skills level, so personal working style. The purpose of the investigation was to penetrate into the patterns of association between a person-unique individual behavior style and quality and reliability of simulated professional operator's jobs. The investigation was part of the MARS-500 experiment (RF SSC - IBMP RAS, 2010-2011) and employed 2 procedures: the well-established manual vehicle control (Pilot-1) and a new one tasking with planetary surface exploration (VIRTU). Observation of individual work styles resulted in identification of 2 fundamentally different approaches to handling the operator's duties - reliable and innovative. It is noteworthy that a separate participant adhered to one and the same style when coping with either procedure. Also, personality traits predisposing to a concrete behavior were found, which confirms the hypothesis of deep personal nature of operator's work style that reveals itself consistently and isomorphically no matter the type of important job.