Cross-disciplinary team-based research is conducted by collaborators from more than one area of expertise. The quality of the scholarship they produce can be influenced strongly by the quality of their collaborative interactions. A new field of study has emerged, called the science of team science (SciTS), that aims to develop an evidence base for the multilevel factors that hinder or facilitate effective research collaboration, such as team characteristics and processes and institutional, funding, and other conditions. This chapter begins with an overview of team science, including a discussion of the major dimensions and processes that shape science teams and unique considerations for cross-disciplinary teams. The chapter then introduces key concepts and milestones in the SciTS field, and reviews conceptual models that explicate the processes and contextual factors that influence research collaboration. The chapter concludes with a discussion of future directions, including additional evidence needed to promote effective cross-disciplinary teamwork.

Fully revised and updated for the fourth edition, the award-winning Oxford Handbook of Public Health Practice remains the first resort for practitioners in the field. Structured into practical sections addressed towards professional competencies and translating evidence into policy, this Handbook provides concise summaries and covers real issues from across the globe, providing a world of experience at your fingertips.Easy-to-use, concise, and practical, this Handbook is divided into seven parts that focus on the vital areas of this broad discipline. Reflecting recent advances, the most promising developments in the practice of public health are presented, along with essential summaries of the core disciplines. Specific sections are devoted to the development of professional competencies including negotiation, communicating risk to the public, community action, and translating evidence into policy.Written by an international team of experts, and considering both social and scientific advances since the previous edition, this Handbook will assist students, trainees and practitioners around the world with its enriched information on the management of disasters, epidemics, health behaviour, acute and chronic disease prevention, community and government action, environmental heath, vulnerable populations, and more.

Many undergraduate students in the health professions experience group work throughout their educational development, but few have the opportunity to experience teamwork in the professional disciplines. Interprofessional teamwork is necessary for successful delivery of accessible, high-quality healthcare aimed at achieving good clinical outcomes and operational efficiencies. Developing teamwork skills early in health professions education results in more successful teams in the workplace. Implementing project-based curricula that integrate undergraduate research and teamwork can lead to discipline-specific learning. The Biomedical Sciences (BMD) and Health Care Management (HCM) undergraduate majors in the UAB School of Health Professions (SHP) each focus on a distinct arm of the healthcare system. To provide these students with interprofessional training early in their education as emerging health professionals, the SHP honors curricula were revised to provide research-based experiential learning and team-building opportunities. Our approach engages BMD and HCM students in interprofessional teams in partnership with faculty mentors and community health providers to complete discipline-specific research projects that ultimately solve realworld problems, resulting in development of critical thinking, team skills, leadership, and cultural awareness of healthcare.

This study evaluated the utility of generic teamwork skills training for enhancing the effectiveness of action teams. Results from 65 4‐person action teams working on an interdependent command and control simulator revealed that generic teamwork skills training had a significant and positive impact on both cognitive and skill‐based outcomes. Trained team members evidenced higher levels of declarative knowledge regarding teamwork competencies and demonstrated greater proficiency in the areas of planning and task coordination, collaborative problem‐solving, and communication. Furthermore, results indicated that cognitive and skill based outcomes were interrelated. Team members' declarative knowledge regarding teamwork competencies positively affected planning and task coordination, collaborative problem solving, and communication skills. However, we found that the effects of declarative knowledge differed across team members depending on their roles and responsibilities. The team benefited the most from the knowledge held by the team member who occupied the most critical position in the workflow. Implications of these findings for future research and practice are discussed.

The objective of this study was to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of teamwork interventions that were carried out with the purpose of improving teamwork and team performance, using controlled experimental designs. A literature search returned 16,849 unique articles. The meta-analysis was ultimately conducted on 51 articles, comprising 72 (k) unique interventions, 194 effect sizes, and 8439 participants, using a random effects model. Positive and significant medium-sized effects were found for teamwork interventions on both teamwork and team performance. Moderator analyses were also conducted, which generally revealed positive and significant effects with respect to several sample, intervention, and measurement characteristics. Implications for effective teamwork interventions as well as considerations for future research are discussed.

Managers must recognize that they play a central role in effective team building. However, to be successful, managers require a framework to guide their activities. The purpose of this paper is to provide such a framework in the form of a seven-step process that can guide managers in their team-building efforts. The model itself is built upon the assumption that there are identifiable team characteristics that, if present, will help ensure team success. The model presents a set of decision strategies for the selection and sequencing of team-building efforts and interventions. The model is an iterative, multi-staged effort that requires considerable planning and environmental knowledge to successfully implement.

BACKGROUND: Effective collaboration and teamwork is essential in providing safe and effective hospital care. Prior research reveals deficiencies in collaboration on medical teaching units. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to assess the impact of an intervention, structured inter-disciplinary rounds (SIDR), on hospital care providers’ ratings of collaboration and teamwork. METHODS: The study was a controlled trial comparing an intervention medical teaching unit with a similar control unit. The intervention, SIDR, combined a structured format for communication with a forum for regular interdisciplinary meetings. We surveyed providers on each unit and asked them to rate the quality of communication and collaboration they had experienced with other disciplines using a five-point ordinal scale. We also assessed the teamwork and safety climate using a validated instrument. Multivariable regression analyses were used to assess the impact on length of stay (LOS) and cost. RESULTS :One hundred forty-seven of 159 (92%) eligible providers completed the survey. Although resident physicians on each unit rated the quality of communication and collaboration with nurses similarly, a greater percentage of nurses gave high ratings to the quality of collaboration with resident physicians on the intervention unit as compared to the control unit (74% vs. 44%; p = 0.02). Providers on the intervention unit rated the teamwork climate significantly higher as compared to the control unit (82.4 ± 11.7 vs. 77.3 ± 12.3; p = 0.01). The difference was explained by higher teamwork climate ratings on the part of nurses on the intervention unit (83.5 ± 14.7 vs. 74.2 ± 14.1; p = 0.005). Ratings of the safety climate were not significantly different between units. Adjusted LOS and hospital costs were not significantly different between units. CONCLUSIONS: SIDR had a positive effect on nurses’ ratings of collaboration and teamwork on a medical teaching unit. Further study is required to assess the impact of SIDR on patient safety measures.

The centrality of teamwork in ensuring the effective functioning of institutions across all sectors is undeniable. However, embedding teamwork into higher education has been hampered due to a range of deeply entrenched practices associated broadly with the foregrounding of knowledge, beliefs about the place of skill training and routines of assessment. As a result, despite an urgent need to address teamwork, little progress has been made with respect to progressing teamwork education. We have designed and evaluated a novel teamwork module delivered to fourth‐year undergraduate medical students involving placements, a cocreated piece of work, reflection and summative peer assessment. This paper aimed to investigate whether the module increased students’ insight into teamwork, including their own skill development, and whether their perceptions of teamwork changed. Throughout the evaluation, students played a key role, with four final‐year medical students working alongside others in the multidisciplinary project team. Five distinct themes emerged from our in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews: (a) importance and meaning; (b) insight into skill development; (c) transferability; (d) peer assessment; and (e) resistance to teamwork education. Themes had positive and negative components, and student perceptions changed in multiple ways after experiencing a longitudinal educational opportunity to develop their teamwork skills. Before practice, students focused on superficial explanations and on where they might improve. In contrast, after practice, students conveyed deeper insights, contextualisation, focus on how they might improve, and shared structured reflection. This article explores medical students’ perspectives on teamwork, in the context of a peer‐assessed teamwork module. We discuss our attempts to develop and assess teamwork in UK undergraduates and consider the challenges of teamwork education and assessment. Here, we present a detailed qualitative analysis of our students’ experiences and discuss good practice in teaching this crucial transferable skill.

Background Patients are safer and receive higher quality care when providers work as a highly effective team. Investment in optimising healthcare teamwork has swelled in the last 10 years. Consequently, evidence regarding the effectiveness for these interventions has also grown rapidly. We provide an updated review concerning the current state of team-training science and practice in acute care settings. Methods A PubMed search for review articles examining team-training interventions in acute care settings published between 2000 and 2012 was conducted. Following identification of relevant reviews with searches terminating in 2008 and 2010, PubMed and PSNet were searched for additional primary studies published in 2011 and 2012. Primary outcomes included patient outcomes and quality indices. Secondary outcomes included teamwork behaviours, knowledge and attitudes. Results Both simulation and classroom-based team-training interventions can improve teamwork processes (eg, communication, coordination and cooperation), and implementation has been associated with improvements in patient safety outcomes. Thirteen studies published between 2011 and 2012 reported statistically significant changes in teamwork behaviours, processes or emergent states and 10 reported significant improvement in clinical care processes or patient outcomes, including mortality and morbidity. Effects were reported across a range of clinical contexts. Larger effect sizes were reported for bundled team-training interventions that included tools and organisational changes to support sustainment and transfer of teamwork competencies into daily practice. Conclusions Overall, moderate-to-high-quality evidence suggests team-training can positively impact healthcare team processes and patient outcomes. Additionally, toolkits are available to support intervention development and implementation. Evidence suggests bundled team-training interventions and implementation strategies that embed effective teamwork as a foundation for other improvement efforts may offer greatest impact on patient outcomes.

Today’s societal challenges, such as climate change and global pandemics, are increasingly complex and require collaboration across scientific disciplines to address. Scientific teams bring together individuals of varying backgrounds and expertise to work collaboratively on creating new knowledge to address these challenges. Within a scientific team, there is inherent diversity in disciplinary cultures and preferences for interpersonal collaboration. Such diversity contributes to the potential strength of the created knowledge but can also impede progress when teams struggle to collaborate productively. Facilitation is a professional practice-based form of interpersonal expertise that supports group members to do their best thinking. Although facilitation has been demonstrated to support group functioning in a wide range of contexts, its role in supporting scientific teams has been largely overlooked. This essay defines scientific facilitation as a form of interactional expertise and explains how facilitating scientific teams requires skills in managing interpersonal interactions as well as understanding how different types of disciplinary knowledge integrate in the creation of new knowledge. Next, it explains how this science facilitation expertise may be developed through metacognition. Finally, it provides examples of how scientific facilitation could be more widely incorporated into research by describing three pathways to expand the use of facilitation theory and techniques in collaborative scientific research: developing facilitation skills among scientists leading teams, using broadly trained facilitators, and using specialised science facilitators. The strengths and risks of each path are discussed, and criteria are suggested for selecting the right approach for a given team science project.

We highlight linguistic-related challenges in multicultural teams that increase the likelihood of emotional conflict, and also highlight the difficulty of "finding words" in emotional situations because of the nonlinear, fragmented, image-driven qualities of these circumstances. As a result, we question whether team members embroiled in emotional conflict ought to be advised to talk (discuss their feelings with the goal of repairing frayed relationships), whether this meaning of talk is shared by people from culturally different backgrounds, and what conflict management alternatives may exist when talk is not possible or desirable.