Meetings are routine in organizations, but their value is often questioned by the employees who must sit through them daily. The science of meetings that has emerged as of late provides necessary direction toward improving meetings, but an evaluation of the current state of the science is much needed. In this review, we examine current directions for the psychological science of workplace meetings, with a focus on applying scientific findings about the activities that occur before, during, and after meetings that facilitate success. We conclude with concrete recommendations and a checklist for promoting good meetings, as well as some thoughts on the future of the science of workplace meetings.
Care coordination challenges for patients with cancer continue to grow as expanding treatment options, multimodality treatment regimens, and an aging population with comorbid conditions intensify demands for multidisciplinary cancer care. Effective teamwork is a critical, yet understudied, cornerstone of coordinated cancer care delivery. For example, comprehensive lung cancer care involves a clinical “team-of-teams”—or clinical multiteam system (MTS)—coordinating decisions and care across specialties, providers, and settings. The teamwork processes within and between these teams lay the foundation for coordinated care. While the need to work as a team and coordinate across disciplinary, organizational, and geographic boundaries increases, evidence identifying and improving the teamwork processes underlying care coordination and delivery among the multiple teams involved remains sparse. This commentary synthesizes MTS structure characteristics and teamwork processes into a conceptual framework called the cancer Multiteam System (cMTS) Framework to advance future cancer care delivery research addressing evidence gaps in care coordination. Included constructs were identified from published frameworks, discussions at the 2016 NCI-ASCO Teams in Cancer Care Workshop, and expert input. A case example in lung cancer provided practical grounding for framework refinement. The cMTS framework identifies team structure variables and teamwork processes affecting cancer care delivery, related outcomes, and contextual variables hypothesized to influence coordination within and between the multiple clinical teams involved. We discuss how the framework might be used to identify care delivery research gaps, develop hypothesis-driven research examining clinical team functioning, and support conceptual coherence across studies examining teamwork, care coordination, and their impact on cancer outcomes.
These findings indicate that the training intervention was partially effective, but more work needs to be done to determine the conditions under which training is most effective, and the ways in which to sustain improvements. Future research is needed to confirm its generalizability to additional OB units and departments.
The health care industry is recognizing the importance of political skill among its professionals. To address this need, a longitudinal study investigates how the political skill of health care leaders ( N = 555) evolves and impacts unit performance. Utilizing cross-lagged panel through a three-wave study, measurement equivalence and analysis of variance, we found political skill to influence performance differently over time, across professions, and at the dimension level. Interestingly, political skill did not just influence next year’s political skill levels in health care leaders, but also showed a strong positive influence on the unit’s performance. Similar lagged overall effects were found for both clinical and nonclinical leaders with the caveat that political skills dimensions can evolve differently. For instance, networking ability is underdeveloped and likely to decrease over time for clinical leaders. In summary, future theories and applications consider the temporal elements, the dimensionality of political skill, and the differences in leaders’ occupational interests. We discuss further implications and future research.
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