NASA Scenarios

Imagine that you are soaring through space, marveling in its’ beauty and glory. You realize man’s insignificance as you peer out the tiny porthole looking at the milky radiance as you cruise silently through the “phosphorescent sea”. You are pulled from your gaze by the sound of your onboard printer working away, and then reality hits you. It is your daily 6 foot long list of tasks that NASA has sent you after they finished their daily gripe session about being overworked, understaffed, and underpaid. NASA sure knew how to treat the three Skylab crews.
Team 1, led by Conrad, seemed to really exhibit E-to-P and P-to-O expectancies. Conrad sold the crew and NASA on the team giving up their scheduled day off to catch up on experiments and
The crew’s ability to fix the solar panels and install the thermal parasol made them “instant heroes” and had a very high outcome valence – the crew was very proud of this successful outcome.
The second team’s makeup served to really help productivity. Bean and Lousma were very interested in quantitative and comparative data; they, especially Bean, really wanted to know how they were doing in comparison to the first team. This perception that their increased efforts would yield better performance and that this performance would in turn yield better outcomes are concrete examples of their E-to-P and P-to-O expectancies, respectively. That’s not to say that Garriot’s perceptions and values didn’t follow the same motivational theory as he was just as interested in real and measurable data as his crewmates. Even though all three crewmembers had similar technical backgrounds, Garriot was able to look at things differently and really got the other guys
NASA was also aware of several personality issues, that left unaddressed had the potential to cause problems down the line. These issues were that the team had never been in space before, no one on the crew shared any personal ties with either of the two previous crews, and that Skylab 3’s science pilot, Gibson, was known to be one of the most “contrariest and bitchingest” astronauts ever to leave Cape Kennedy. NASA continued to feed countervalent outcomes when they publicly reprimanded the crew for not reporting the vomiting of Pogue. This only helped to feed the “us against them” mentality that the third crew had developed. Throughout their time in space, there were regular occurrences of rebellion. Whether it was caused by a cut in allocated exercise time, scheduling experiments during meal time, poor toilet facilities, or one of the other numerous issues – the third crew believed that no matter what they did in terms of effort or performance, it would have little or no effect on the outcome. I think it’s safe to say their E-to-P and P-to-O expectations were very low! It’s also safe to say that the team anticipated dissatisfaction with the possible outcomes. Simply said, they believed that whatever they did would not be good enough and that NASA’s task had very little, if any,