Few industries match the scale of health care. In the United States alone, an estimated 85% of the population has at least 1 health care encounter annually and at least one quarter of these people experience 4 to 9 encounters annually. A single visit requires collaboration among a multidisciplinary group of clinicians, administrative staff, patients, and their loved ones. Multiple visits often occur across different clinicians working in different organizations. Ineffective care coordination and the underlying suboptimal teamwork processes are a public health issue. Health care delivery systems exemplify complex organizations operating under high stakes in dynamic policy and regulatory environments. The coordination and delivery of safe, high-quality care demands reliable teamwork and collaboration within, as well as across, organizational, disciplinary, technical, and cultural boundaries. In this review, we synthesize the evidence examining teams and teamwork in health care delivery settings in order to characterize the current state of the science and to highlight gaps in which studies can further illuminate our evidence-based understanding of teamwork and collaboration. Specifically, we highlight evidence concerning (a) the relationship between teamwork and multilevel outcomes, (b) effective teamwork behaviors, (c) competencies (i.e., knowledge, skills, and attitudes) underlying effective teamwork in the health professions, (d) teamwork interventions, (e) team performance measurement strategies, and (f) the critical role context plays in shaping teamwork and collaboration in practice. We also distill potential avenues for future research and highlight opportunities to understand the translation, dissemination, and implementation of evidence-based teamwork principles into practice. (PsycINFO Database Record

Applications of the results from this research are numerous. Those who design and administer training can benefit from these findings in order to improve the effectiveness of their team training interventions.

There has been a growing popular fascination with how experts make rapid and effective decisions. This interest has been paralleled in various scientific research communities. Across these disciplinary boundaries, researchers have found that intuition plays a critical role in expert decision making. Therefore, an understanding of how experts develop and use intuition effectively within organizations has the potential to greatly influence organizational practices and effectiveness. The purpose of this review is to integrate the extant literature related to expertise-based intuition—intuition rooted in extensive experience within a specific domain—in decision making. To that end, this review addresses four specific goals. First, the authors review the scientific literature on expertise and intuition to define expertise-based intuition, the type of intuition of most value to organizations. Second, the authors propose a set of descriptive developmental and performance mechanisms of expertise-based intuition in decision making. Third, the authors discuss the multilevel nature of expertise-based intuition. Fourth, the authors propose future directions for research and application.

This research reports the results of a comprehensive investigation into the effectiveness of team building. The article serves to update and extend Salas, Rozell, Mullen, and Driskell's (1999) team-building meta-analysis by assessing a larger database and examining a broader set of outcomes. Our study considers the impact of four specific team-building components (goal setting, interpersonal relations, problem solving, and role clarification) on cognitive, affective, process, and performance outcomes. Results (based on 60 correlations) suggest that team building has a positive moderate effect across all team outcomes. In terms of specific outcomes, team building was most strongly related to affective and process outcomes. Results are also presented on the differential effectiveness of team building based upon the team size.

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