Teams need to be healthy, too: toward a definition and model of healthy teams

Abstract

Purpose Teams across a wide range of contexts must look beyond task performance to consider the affective, cognitive and behavioral health of their members. Despite much interest in team health in practice, consideration of team health has remained scant from a research perspective. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues by advancing a definition and model of team health. Design/methodology/approach The authors review relevant literature on team stress, processes and emergent states to propose a definition and model of team health. Findings The authors advance a definition of team health, or the holistic, dynamic compilation of states that emerge and interact as a team resource to buffer stress. Further, the authors argue that team health improves outcomes at both the individual and team level by improving team members’ well-being and enhancing team effectiveness, respectively. In addition, the authors propose a framework integrating the job demands-resources model with the input-mediator-output-input model of teamwork to illustrate the behavioral drivers that promote team health, which buffers teams stress to maintain members’ well-being and team effectiveness. Originality/value This work answers calls from multidisciplinary industries for work that considers team health, providing implications for future research in this area.