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Team training contributes to improved performance, reduced errors, and even saving lives—and it exists today because psychologists collaborated across domains to contribute their expertise. Our objective was to highlight the salient role of multidisciplinary collaboration in the success of team training, an area driven by psychologists responding to real-world problems. In this article, we deliver (a) a historical account of team training research, acknowledging critical turning points that shaped the science; (b) a synthesis of major contributions from subdisciplines of psychology; and (c) a collection of lessons learned in the science and practice of team training. We begin with the history of problems that created a need for solutions and the psychologists across domains who worked together to develop a science to improve teamwork. We give poignant examples of fatal mistakes that incited action and enabled scientific breakthroughs through research partnerships. Next, we detail the theoretical drivers behind the science and the hands-on approach of investigating how we turn a team of experts into an expert team. We discuss the spectrum of team training research throughout time, including major influences that shifted dominant paradigms of thought, while emphasizing its multidisciplinary nature and the contributions of psychologists. Finally, we provide a list of lessons learned from a half-century of multidisciplinary research.

As health care delivery moves toward more complex, team-based systems, the topic of medical teamwork has gained considerable attention and study across disciplines. This systematic review integrates empirical research on teamwork and health care to identify broad trends. We identified and coded 1,818 relevant, English, and peer-reviewed journal articles using a teamwork processes rubric. Several themes emerged. The health care teamwork literature has grown substantially over the past 20 years. Approximately half of the studies were descriptive (rather than interventional or psychometric); the majority relied on quantitative methods. Health care teamwork was also studied in thematically distinct manners. Interpersonal processes were most commonly studied across fields. Of all disciplines, medicine focused most on transition processes, whereas those from team science centered more highly on action processes. There were also finer grained disciplinary differences in content areas of communication and collaboration. Interprofessional journals represent a potential area for interdisciplinary efforts. Implications and future directions are discussed.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has ravaged the United States, health care teams are on the frontlines of this global crisis, often navigating harrowing conditions at work, such as a lack of personal protective equipment and staffing shortages, and distractions at home, including worries about elderly relatives or making childcare arrangements. While the nature and severity of stressors impacting health care teams are in many ways unprecedented, decades of psychological research exploring teamwork in extreme contexts can provide insights to understand and improve outcomes for teams in a crisis. This review highlights the psychological principles that apply to teams in a crisis and illustrates how psychologists can use this knowledge to improve teamwork for medical teams in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic., The review also provides a glimpse toward the future, noting both how psychologists can help health care teams recover and rebound, as well as how additional research can improve psychologists' understanding of teamwork in times of crisis. Public Significance StatementIn the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, medical teams have been central to community and healthcare center response efforts. However, increased stressors from both within and outside of the hospital have generated unprecedented challenges for healthcare teams and their members. This review highlights how psychological research can inform our understanding of stress in healthcare teams, focusing on evidence-based countermeasures that can improve teamwork during and in the aftermath of the pandemic.

In this review, we conceptualize teamwork as the linchpin driving safety performance throughout an organization. Safety is promoted by teams through various mechanisms that interact in a complex and dynamic process. We press pause on this dynamic process to organize a discussion highlighting the critical role played by teamwork factors in the engagement of safe and unsafe behavior, identifying five team-level emergent states that enable effective teamwork and safety: psychological safety, team trust, collective efficacy, shared mental models, and situation awareness. Additionally, we consider foundational conditions that support team-driven safety, the development of safety culture, and the importance of team safety climate in shaping performance. We discuss leveraging teams to generate safety and identify directions for future research investigating the relationship between teamwork and safety. Overall, we submit that researchers and practitioners would benefit from taking a systems perspective of safety by integrating principles of team science to better understand and promote safety in organizations.

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