Cognitive versatility and adaptation to fluid participation in hospital emergency department teams.

Role-based frameworks have long been the cornerstone of organizational coordination, providing clarity in role expectations among team members. However, the rise of "fluid participation"-a constant shift in team composition and skill sets-poses new challenges to traditional coordination mechanisms. In particular, with fluid participation, a team's roles can oscillate between disconnected and intersecting, or between lacking and having overlap in the capabilities and expectations of different roles. This study investigates the possibility that a disconnected set of roles creates a structural constraint on the flexible coordination needed to perform in volatile contexts, as well as the mitigating role of cognitive versatility in a team's strategically-central member. Utilizing a sample of 342 teams from a hospital Emergency Department, we find that teams with a disconnected role set are less effective than teams with an intersecting role set as demonstrated by longer patient stays and increased handoffs during shift changes. Importantly, the presence of a cognitively versatile attending physician mitigates these negative outcomes, enhancing overall team effectiveness. Our findings remain robust even after accounting for other variables like team expertise and familiarity. This research extends the Carnegie School's seminal work on fluid participation by integrating insights from psychology and organizational behavior, thereby identifying key individual attributes that can bolster team coordination in dynamic settings.

The consequences of social category faultlines in high- and low-context cultures: A comparative study of Brazil and Germany.

The present study sheds light on how differences between high- and low-context cultures influence the consequences of social category faultlines. To develop our theoretical arguments, we integrate ideas from faultline theory and Hall's theory on cultural contexts. We test our hypotheses using survey data from 54 teams in the banking industry in Germany, a nation with a low-context culture, and in Brazil, a country with a high-context culture. In line with our theorizing, the study results reveal that whether social category faultline strength stimulates task conflict and is thus detrimental to team performance depends on the societal culture in which teams operate. Specifically, we observe that social category faultlines stimulate task conflict and thus have a negative indirect effect on team performance in Germany's low-context culture, while we find no such effects in the high-context culture of Brazil. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our study and close with some suggestions for future research.