BackgroundAmidst the unprecedented outbreak of COVID-19, it is both critical and increasingly difficult for healthcare professionals to engage in the teamwork that will underlie an effective response to the pandemic. The simultaneous need for and challenge to teamwork, though, is not unique to healthcare.ResultsDrawing on management and organisational research conducted in healthcare as well as other industries, this article offers an overview of key, and robust, findings that highlight both what teamwork looks like and how to achieve it. I focus on two aspects of teamwork (the coordination of expertise and communication), and I review how leaders can jumpstart them by leveraging mechanisms including framing the work, using communication structures and engaging in leader inclusiveness.
Increasingly, organizational teams form quickly and change shape during their short lifespans, meaning they break from traditional definitions of “real” teams and experience instability in team membership and boundaries. While scholars have examined conditions that support effective teamwork in more-stable teams, we know little about how these dynamic teams can come to look like real teams that work interdependently rather than independently. My observations of and interviews with medical inpatient teams in a U.S. children’s hospital revealed a small subset of teams that succeeded at working interdependently within a core group (internally) and with a shifting set of peripheral contributors (externally). Brief periods of synchronous internal and external teamwork distinguished these emergently interdependent teams. To achieve these synchronous periods, core team members distributed their focus on internal team members and on peripheral members such as nurses, specialists, patients, and patients’ family members. Furthermore, core teams intertwined synchronous periods with cycles of external and internal coordination as team boundaries expanded and contracted. Such interdependence was associated with more-efficient work: faster morning rounds and, for patients, shorter hospital stays. Additionally, initial meetings among core team members set the stage for more-interdependent work. My findings contribute to dynamic teams research by illuminating the process of how teams can work interdependently as team boundaries expand and contract, to external activities research by suggesting that synchronous periods hold together previously documented cycles of separate internal and external activities, and to team launches research by extending work with more-stable teams to dynamic teams.
Teams offer the potential to achieve more than any person could achieve working alone; yet, particularly in teams that span professional boundaries, it is critical to capitalize on the variety of knowledge, skills, and abilities available. This article reviews research from the field of organizational behavior to shed light on what makes for a collectively intelligent team. In doing so, we highlight the importance of moving beyond simply including smart people on a team to thinking about how those people can effectively coordinate and collaborate. In particular, we review the importance of two communication processes: ensuring that team members with relevant knowledge (1) speak up when one's expertise can be helpful and (2) influence the team's work so that the team does its collective best for the patient. The Promise and Challenge of Team-Based Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration in Health CareAcross health care, there is an increasing reliance on teams from a variety of specialties (e.g., nursing, physician specialties, physical therapy, social work) to care for patients. At the same time, medical error is estimated to be "the third most common cause of death in the US" [1], and teamwork failures (e.g., failures in communication) account for up to 70-80 percent of serious medical errors [2][3][4][5]. The shift to providing care in teams is well founded given the potential for improved performance that comes with teamwork [6], but, as demonstrated by these grave statistics, teamwork does not come without challenges. Consequently, there is a critical need for health care professionals, particularly those in leadership roles, to consider strategies for improving team-based approaches to providing quality patient care.Teams offer the promise to improve clinical care because they can aggregate, modify, combine, and apply a greater amount and variety of knowledge in order to make decisions, solve problems, generate ideas, and execute tasks more effectively and efficiently than any individual working alone [6]. Given this potential, a multidisciplinary team of health care professionals could ideally work together to determine diagnoses,
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