Teamwork

A 2012 review of the academic literature found that the word "teamwork" has been used "as a catchall to refer to a number of behavioral processes and emergent states".

In healthcare, teamwork is "a dynamic process involving two or more healthcare professionals with complementary background and skills, sharing common health goals and exercising concerted physical and mental effort in assessing, planning, or evaluating patient care". Having followed a volatile trend in the past century, the societal diffusion and application of teamwork has shown a sharp increase since the late 1970s.

In a business setting, accounting techniques may be used to provide financial measures of the benefits of teamwork which are useful for justifying the concept. Health-care policy-makers increasingly advocate teamwork as a means of assuring quality and safety in the delivery of services; a committee of the Institute of Medicine recommended in 2000 that patient-safety programs "establish interdisciplinary team training programs for providers that incorporate proven methods of team training, such as simulation."

In health care, a systematic concept analysis in 2008 concluded teamwork to be "a dynamic process involving two or more healthcare professionals with complementary backgrounds and skills, sharing common health goals and exercising concerted physical and mental effort in assessing, planning, or evaluating patient care." Elsewhere teamwork is defined as "those behaviours that facilitate effective team member interaction", with "team" defined as "a group of two or more individuals who perform some work related task, interact with one another dynamically, have a shared past, have a foreseeable shared future, and share a common fate". Another definition for teamwork proposed in 2008 is "the interdependent components of performance required to effectively coordinate the performance of multiple individuals"; as such, teamwork is "nested within" the broader concept of team performance, which also includes individual-level taskwork.

When talking about teamwork, it is important to first properly define the term "team" – many people think they work in teams when really, they work in so-called pseudo teams – groups of co-workers put together and called a team, but without fulfilling basic requirements for effective teamwork. Basic requirements for effective teamwork are an adequate team size (best seems to be about 6-8 members); a clearly defined and measureable goal (such as the creation of a new product in innovative jobs, a high patient survival rate in healthcare jobs, or customer satisfaction in service-oriented jobs) (see also Motivation and Cohesion), as well as autonomy, authority and resources needed to fulfil the team goal. Furthermore, roles within the team should be clearly defined.

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Wikipedia