Leadership challenges in ISS operations: Lessons learned from junior and senior mission control personnel

The International Space Station (ISS) is operated by a multi-national, multi-organizational team that is dispersed across multiple locations, time zones, and work schedules. At NASA, mission control personnel have had to find ways to address the leadership challenges inherent in,such work, but have not had systematic training on how to do so. We interviewed 12 junior controllers and 14 senior controllers to examine the major leadership challenges they face and to highlight the solutions that they have found most effective to surmount them. We compare the perspectives of the two groups. Further, we contextualize our survey results with new analyses of standardized questionnaire data from 186 mission control personnel and a contrasting group of 30 space station crewmembers. The interview data showed that respondents had substantial consensus on several leadership challenges and on key strategies for dealing with them, but junior and senior controllers' perspectives were different. The questionnaire data showed that the US mission control sample reported a level of support from their management that compared favorably to national norms. Although specific to space station personnel, our results are consistent with recent management, cultural, and aerospace research. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.