CAREER: Detecting Patterned Profiles for Functional and Dysfunctional Teamwork

Clemson University, Clemson SC

Investigators

Abstract

Teams are a prominent means for organizations to achieve efficiency, leveraging the power of many to achieve goals far beyond what an individual can accomplish alone. Team development interventions (TDIs) refer to tools, trainings, and resources intended to support teamwork competency development, and have enhanced team effectiveness by helping teams coordinate and collaborate to maximize team productivity and reduce errors. Yet, many organizational strategies for implementing TDIs often resemble a shotgun approach: if we provide enough TDIs to enough people, covering enough broad information, everyone should eventually be able to engage in better teamwork. At a basic level, this strategy can address fundamental skills. However, individuals and teams may be getting only a small piece of what is useful for their particular needs. Instead, organizations need better tools to periodically assess team functioning in order to identify what and when TDIs teams truly need to improve their functioning in a timely manner. This can extend critically limited organizational resources, and can empower teams to handle their specific challenges more efficiently, maximizing the use of resources for societal benefit. Thus, we aim to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of the design and delivery of TDIs, focusing on research that will enable a better way to pinpoint teamwork needs. To advance our knowledge and practice of TDIs, this research leverages a profile-centric approach via the investigation of teamwork state profiles. Such profiles holistically identify groupings or categories of teams based upon where they fall on a set of relevant functional/dysfunctional factors. We aim to move beyond traditional variable-centric teamwork approaches through empirically demonstrating that profiles more holistically represent the interactions of different teamwork factors over time, providing more meaningful guidance as to which TDIs may be most needed to improve or maintain teamwork. The application of profiles to a teamwork context is innovative, with enormous potential for research and education alike. A mixed-method series of four studies will be used to achieve the overall research and educational goals. In these studies, we will systematically advance teamwork science by applying novel methods for identifying, interpreting, and monitoring teamwork profiles, in order to subsequently assess and develop educational resources and tools for a more appropriate path to selecting TDIs. These studies will be conducted in field settings, moving from archival exploratory analytic techniques to discern key teamwork factors and profiles, to the systematic, quantitative evaluation of propositions surrounding the value of profiles for enhancing team effectiveness and TDIs. We test our ideas in the context of two disciplines critical to society, healthcare and engineering, in order to discern: 1) the efficacy of a profile approach to teamwork in different organizational settings; 2) the multi-level characteristics influencing profile emergence; 3) the value of using profiles as a predictor of team effectiveness; and 4) the validity of using profiles to better match TDIs for desired outcomes. Leveraging these two contextual domains further, this work will enable us to educate beyond one audience; findings will be integrated with and applied to the enduring education and training practices of multiple audiences of healthcare employees, medical students/residents, and engineering students preparing to enter their respective fields.