Team Familiarity and Productivity in Cardiac Surgery Operations: The Effect of Dispersion, Bottlenecks, and Task Complexity

Abstract

Fluid teams are commonly used by a variety of organizations to perform similar and repetitive yet highly critical and knowledge-intensive tasks. Such teams operate for a limited time, after which they dissolve and some of their members may work together again as part of another team. Using a granular dataset of 6,206 cardiac surgeries from a private hospital in Europe over seven years, our study offers a new and detailed account of how team familiarity (i.e., shared work experience) influences team productivity. We highlight the role of nuanced team composition dynamics beyond average team familiarity. We observe that teams with high dispersion of pairwise familiarity exhibit lower team productivity, and the existence of a "bottleneckpair" may significantly hinder overall knowledge transfer capability, thus, productivity of fluid teams. In addition, we find that the higher the percentage of familiarity gained from complex tasks, the higher the productivity of the team. Finally, our results suggest that the positive effect of average team familiarity on productivity is enhanced when performing more complicated tasks. Our study provides new operational insights to improve productivity of fluid teams with better team composition strategies.

Implementing new technologies for complex care: The role of embeddedness factors in team learning

“…In line with the opening statement of Ohno (1988Ohno ( , first published in 1978, Edmondson et al conclude that: "In an industry context in which individual heroism and skill are assumed to be the critical determinants of important outcomes, … empowering a team and managing a learning process matter greatly for an organization's ability to learn in response to external innovation" (2001:712). Avgerinos and Gokpinar (2017) found that particularly for complex tasks, team familiarity has a positive impact on team performance, and in line with Huckman (2003), they suggest that teams should be kept together when tasks are complex. Avgerinos and Gokpinar (2017) found that particularly for complex tasks, team familiarity has a positive impact on team performance, and in line with Huckman (2003), they suggest that teams should be kept together when tasks are complex.…”

“…Avgerinos and Gokpinar (2017) found that particularly for complex tasks, team familiarity has a positive impact on team performance, and in line with Huckman (2003), they suggest that teams should be kept together when tasks are complex. Many organizations however use fluid teams-that is, teams of which membership changes over time-and accordingly, health care team research has often studied fluid teams performing a specific task (Avgerinos & Gokpinar, 2017;Nembhard & Edmondson, 2006). Many organizations however use fluid teams-that is, teams of which membership changes over time-and accordingly, health care team research has often studied fluid teams performing a specific task (Avgerinos & Gokpinar, 2017;Nembhard & Edmondson, 2006).…”

Team familiarity in cardiac surgery operations: The effects of hierarchy and failure on team productivity

“…Our dataset is essentially structured as time series data at the operation level and our level of observation is each operation. A Durbin-Watson test revealed first-order serial autocorrelation, hence similar to past related studies (Avgerinos and Gokpinar, 2017; Reagans et al, 2005) we use Ordinary Least Squares Regression with AR(1) covariance structure to control for serial correlation among consecutive operations in order to test our hypotheses. The ordering is based on the time of the start of the operation.…”

Why do surgeons schedule their own surgeries?

“…We probed surgeons' experience of factors affecting their ability to execute the planned schedule including complications associated with patient circumstances and disease states, and the need to respond to unforeseen disruptions (e.g., emergency and transplant surgeries). We asked about their relationship with other medical professionals involved in performing surgery as previous research has found that surgical team membership (i.e., nurses, anaesthesiologists, residents, and fellows) and the surgeon's ability to manage that team, can affect whether they can complete a block of surgeries on schedule (Avgerinos & Gokpinar, ). Finally, we asked surgeons how their formal education, professional relationships, and opportunities for performance feedback influenced the values that informed their decision‐making.…”