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I found the following quote in a book on Crew (or Cockpit as it used to be called) Resource Management (CRM). In this context, CRM is a methodology originally developed in the airline industry to improve the effectiveness of teamwork in the cockpit and reduce/mitigate error.

The quote is about a study on fatigue on air crews:

Crews in the post-duty condition had less pre-simulation sleep and reported significantly more fatigue, as expected from the research design. The surprising finding, however, was that fatigued crews were rated as performing significantly better and made fewer serious operational errors than the rested, pre-duty crews. This finding was counterintuitive but had major implications relevant to the importance of team formation and experience. By the nature of the scheduling of flight operations, most crews in the post-duty condition had just completed three days of operations as a team, while those in the pre-duty condition normally did not have the benefit of recent experience with the other crewmember. When the data were reanalyzed on the basis of whether or not crews had flown together recently, the performance differences became even stronger. The findings suggest that crew scheduling practices that result in continuing recomposition of groups and a need for frequent formation of new teams can have significant operational implications. For example, three recent takeoff accidents in the United States (one involving a stall under icing conditions, one an aborted takeoff with an over-run into water, and one a runway collision after the crew became lost in dense fog) involved crews paired together for the first time.1 The implications of crew pairings are discussed further in the chapter by Hackman.
p.13 Crew Resource Management
Copyright  2010, by Elsevier Inc.

In other words, regardless of how competent people are as individuals, to be an effective team, people need to get to know each other. The positive impact of familiarity was strong enough to more than cancel out the, presumably, negative impact of fatigue.

Tagged: Crew Resource Management, Teams