Lecture 3
OB
Teams
Agenda
- Why are teams important?
- What is a team? What is a real team?
- Characteristics of effective teamwork
- How to improve team performance
Why teams?
- Team are everywhere
- Number of team increase
o 90% staff report that they work in a team
- Team is not the answer to everything
- However, important to understand teamwork (in order to get most of the
experience)
- Especially because not all teams are effective
o 92% of employees believe teams are important for organizational success,
only 23% believe their teams to be very effective
Why teams in health care?
- Syngergy (can’t reach something alone): 1+1=3
- Teamwork necessary to provide care
o Complex nature of medicine
o Increasing chronic disease and co-morbidity
o Specialization/task differentiation
o Combining technical and non-technical skills
o Providing 24h care
- Teams are keyplayers for optimization of time and resources
- Social appeal/desirable
West (2013)
- Effective teamwork:
o Reduced medical errors
o Increased patient safety
o Improved worker outcomes and reduced stress
o Related to patient mortality
o Leads to cost-effective care
o Lower staff absenteeism and turnover
o More effective use of resources
o Greater patient satisfaction
Urgency of teamwork
- Preventable harm
1
, o 76.000 patients – 30.000 preventable
- Permanent harm
o 10.000 patients – 6.000 preventable
- Costs
o 167 mill. per year
- Causes
o Complexity of treatment and organization
o Poor communication and teamwork (50-70% of adverse events)
What is a team?
It’s easy to miss something you’re not looking for. If you don’t have a clear picture of what a
team looks like, you might miss it too.
Teams take care of each other, work together for a common goal, different tasks,
dependency, helping each other.
Hundreds of different teams. Exact definition is not important, but similarities are:
- Limited group of people
- Common purpose/set of performance goals
- Mutually accountable/responsible
- Interdependence
“A team is a limited group of people, whose degree of interdependency varies in nature and
intensity, committed to shared and individual goals and mutually responsible for shared
goals.
What is a real team
- Romantic review on teams
- A real team, not in name only (just labelling it as such could even lead to worse
outcomes)
- It has:
o Clear team boundaries (should be clear who is part of the team etc)
o Team member stability
o Interdependency
- However, a real team is context based
- Difficulties in defining team membership:
o Multiple team membership (people are part of different teams, that’s why its
hard to say how many teams they’re part of)
o Inner and outer circle (inner circle – can relate to each other, outer –
unstable, different over time, people come and go)s
o Patient as team member (do we only focus on caregivers? Are patients and
family also a part of the team? Do patients want to be a part of this? Can they
be?)
Still, always have a critical view..
- A team is not the cure to every organizational problem:
o Is a team truly appropriate for the work being done?
o Are tasks done better and more efficient by individuals?
o Is teamwork cost-effective?
2
OB
Teams
Agenda
- Why are teams important?
- What is a team? What is a real team?
- Characteristics of effective teamwork
- How to improve team performance
Why teams?
- Team are everywhere
- Number of team increase
o 90% staff report that they work in a team
- Team is not the answer to everything
- However, important to understand teamwork (in order to get most of the
experience)
- Especially because not all teams are effective
o 92% of employees believe teams are important for organizational success,
only 23% believe their teams to be very effective
Why teams in health care?
- Syngergy (can’t reach something alone): 1+1=3
- Teamwork necessary to provide care
o Complex nature of medicine
o Increasing chronic disease and co-morbidity
o Specialization/task differentiation
o Combining technical and non-technical skills
o Providing 24h care
- Teams are keyplayers for optimization of time and resources
- Social appeal/desirable
West (2013)
- Effective teamwork:
o Reduced medical errors
o Increased patient safety
o Improved worker outcomes and reduced stress
o Related to patient mortality
o Leads to cost-effective care
o Lower staff absenteeism and turnover
o More effective use of resources
o Greater patient satisfaction
Urgency of teamwork
- Preventable harm
1
, o 76.000 patients – 30.000 preventable
- Permanent harm
o 10.000 patients – 6.000 preventable
- Costs
o 167 mill. per year
- Causes
o Complexity of treatment and organization
o Poor communication and teamwork (50-70% of adverse events)
What is a team?
It’s easy to miss something you’re not looking for. If you don’t have a clear picture of what a
team looks like, you might miss it too.
Teams take care of each other, work together for a common goal, different tasks,
dependency, helping each other.
Hundreds of different teams. Exact definition is not important, but similarities are:
- Limited group of people
- Common purpose/set of performance goals
- Mutually accountable/responsible
- Interdependence
“A team is a limited group of people, whose degree of interdependency varies in nature and
intensity, committed to shared and individual goals and mutually responsible for shared
goals.
What is a real team
- Romantic review on teams
- A real team, not in name only (just labelling it as such could even lead to worse
outcomes)
- It has:
o Clear team boundaries (should be clear who is part of the team etc)
o Team member stability
o Interdependency
- However, a real team is context based
- Difficulties in defining team membership:
o Multiple team membership (people are part of different teams, that’s why its
hard to say how many teams they’re part of)
o Inner and outer circle (inner circle – can relate to each other, outer –
unstable, different over time, people come and go)s
o Patient as team member (do we only focus on caregivers? Are patients and
family also a part of the team? Do patients want to be a part of this? Can they
be?)
Still, always have a critical view..
- A team is not the cure to every organizational problem:
o Is a team truly appropriate for the work being done?
o Are tasks done better and more efficient by individuals?
o Is teamwork cost-effective?
2
