Team dynamics and team empowerment in health care organizations.

BACKGROUND: Despite the growing pervasiveness of team-based job designs in health care organizations, there is a degree of uncertainty and ambiguity about the process through which teams affect outcomes. PURPOSE: This research adds to our understanding of the process by which team dynamics affects team member attitudes. It investigates the role of team empowerment as a mediator in the relationships between team context, team atmosphere, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. METHODOLOGY: Multiple regression analysis is used to test for the mediating effect of team empowerment in the relationships that team context and team atmosphere have with job satisfaction and organizational commitment. FINDINGS: Team empowerment mediates the relationships of team context and team atmosphere with job satisfaction and organizational commitment. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS: Although adopting team-based job designs is an important first step, attention must also be paid to the context and atmosphere of such teams. Better outcomes will be achieved when team members perceive a supportive team atmosphere and an empowering team context with clear and jointly developed goals, an appropriate mix of skills and expertise, and rewards linked to team performance.

Service collaboration and hospital cost performance: direct and moderating effects.

BACKGROUND: Growing reliance on service provision through systems and networks creates the need to better understand the nature of the relationship between service collaboration and hospital performance and the conditions that affect this relationship. OBJECTIVE: We examine 1) the effects of service provision through health systems and health networks on hospital cost performance and 2) the moderating effects of market conditions and service differentiation on the collaboration-cost relationship. RESEARCH DESIGN: We used moderated regression analysis to test the direct and moderating effects. Data on 1368 private hospitals came from the 1998 AHA Annual Survey, Medicare Cost Reports, and Solucient. MEASURES: Service collaboration was measured as the proportion of hospital services provided at the system level and at the network level. Market conditions were measured by the levels of managed care penetration and competition in the hospital's market. RESULTS: The proportion of hospital services provided at the system level had a negative relationship with hospital cost. The relationship was curvilinear for network use. Degree of managed care penetration moderated the relationship between network-based collaboration and hospital cost. CONCLUSION: The benefits of service collaboration through systems and networks, as measured by reduced cost, depend on degree of collaboration rather than mere membership. In loosely structured collaborations such as networks, costs reduce initially but increase later as the extent of collaboration increases. The effect of network-based collaboration is also tempered by managed care penetration. These effects are not seen in more tightly integrated forms such as systems.

Ethics orientation as a mediator of organizational integrity in health services organizations.

Increasing scrutiny of ethical misconduct by federal and state agencies has prompted health services organizations to adopt codes of ethics and institute legal compliance programs. However, there is little understanding of the impact of ethics programs or the manner in which program elements act to enhance organizational integrity. This study examined the effect of five ethics program elements on organizational integrity and the mediating role played by ethics orientation in this relationship. It found that program elements influence organizational integrity by engendering among employees a values orientation, a compliance orientation, or both. Furthermore, program elements that induced both orientations have a larger impact on integrity. These findings have important implications for health services managers involved in designing and implementing an ethics program.

Correlates of hospital provision of prevention and health promotion services.

This study investigates the factors associated with hospital provision of prevention and health promotion services. The authors conceptualize the provision of these services as a hospital response to the community health concerns of environmental stakeholders. The response depends on hospital recognition and interpretation of institutional and resource dependence pressures and is related to interorganizational linkages, resource dependencies, and information processing structure. Data for the study came from 3,453 U.S. hospitals. The authors found that hospital provision of prevention and health promotion services is positively related to alliance and network membership, the diffusion of such services among other area hospitals, the use of community health status information, and hospital size. Also, for-profit hospitals provide fewer prevention and health promotion services than not-for-profit hospitals. These findings have policy and management implications.

A stakeholder approach to community health management.

Although community health management has become an important issue for health care organizations, there is little information on the roles that they and other community institutions ought to play in this area. This article develops a stakeholder approach to community health management, identifies the set of community health stakeholders, determines their salience to health care organizations, discusses the strategies they use to influence organizational involvement in community health management, and examines the responses of health care organizations. Implications for community institutions, health care managers, and researchers are discussed.