Interprofessional teamwork in healthcare: Observations and the road ahead.

In this effort we draw from the literature on interprofessional teamwork in high reliability organizations from different fields of study, including healthcare, industrial/organizational psychology, and management. We combine this literature with our collective experience to offer five observations on future needs for the field of team science research and practice. These themes include: (1) exploration of nonclinical teams, (2) evaluation of multi-team systems in healthcare, (3) the study of dyad leadership of teams, (4) the proliferation of virtual healthcare teams, and (5) the continuing integration of organizational and team science into the study of interprofessional teams. By presenting these observations, we argue why each is critical to the overall understanding of interprofessional teamwork in healthcare and provide areas for future scholarly advancement that will inform healthcare practice.

Core conditions of team effectiveness: Development of a survey measuring Hackman's framework.

Leaders and team development practitioners working toward increasing interprofessional team effectiveness frequently need to quickly and accurately determine the extent to which a team possesses the most essential and foundational components required for effective teamwork. While there is no shortage of team theories, there are few freely available, practical, short, and well-developed surveys to measure team functioning across a variety of team types. We developed a 9-item team assessment to fill this gap in the literature, measuring the most fundamental criteria for optimising team functioning, based on Hackman's widely used framework of the foundational conditions for team effectiveness. Reliability and validity of the assessment were investigated through multiple methods, including confirmatory factor analysis and bivariate correlations. Initial psychometric work would appear to support the use of this assessment to measure the three core conditions of team effectiveness. This assessment can be completed by interprofessional team members and their responses can be used to help leaders and team development practitioners focus resources on the most relevant conditions to increase the likelihood of team effectiveness.