Clarifying the muddy concept of home healthcare coordination: A comprehensive theoretical framework

Effective healthcare coordination is vital when such care is provided as a collaborative effort by many individuals and their task activities are interdependent. Coordination is necessary to ensure that care not only meets the needs of patients, but also avoids negative consequences for them due to omitted, inefficient, unnecessary, or even incorrect treatments. It also helps conserve resources. This has contributed to a rapid increase in articles on this subject. Still, while care coordination topics are gaining the attention of researchers, there are a number of issues experienced, including the delineation of limitations, inconsistent definitions, and problems with measurement. Therefore, the aim of this article is to refine the concept of homecare coordination and provide a comprehensive theoretical framework, illustrated with examples from practice. Focusing on this goal, we have reviewed the extant literature on the subject to develop a theoretical homecare coordination framework. The first intermediary goal was to integrate relevant concepts across multiple theories and frameworks into a unified synthesis. We do so in two parts: (1) analysis of extant coordination frameworks and theories; and (2) the presentation of our newly developed theoretical framework for homecare coordination. The new framework differentiates clearly between coordination as a process-i.e., what people do to coordinate and coordination as an outcome-i.e., the state of coordination. Applying this distinction to both, measurement and interpretation of results helps avoid misleading conclusions. As a research outcome, our framework builds upon the extant coordination literature, considers the complex relationships among the various coordination-related factors and, while focusing on homecare, is applicable to various healthcare settings in general. A nuanced differentiation and explanation of the elements involved enable a more consistent operationalization of the coordination concept. Additionally, as they explicitly address the healthcare system's micro, meso, and macro levels, they can be applied across diverse healthcare settings to investigate homecare coordination.

The skills that help employees adapt: Empirical validation of a four-category framework

Globalization, technological advances, economic and geopolitical shocks, pandemics, and any number of novel or unanticipated events have one thing in common: they represent change and require dynamic responses and adaptation from organizations, teams, and individuals. A critical resource for individuals to be adaptive are broad skills relevant to varied organizational conditions. These adaptive skills have been discussed in diverse venues but rarely in the organizational literature. Also, most, if not all, of extant conceptual frameworks related to adaptive skills remain unvalidated. The purpose of this research was to organize these skills, define and situate them in the relevant organizational and psychological literatures, and empirically test a proposed four-category framework. The experimental results supported the C+MAC framework, as skills were better categorized in terms of their theoretically related category. Additionally, the four-category framework proved a better fit to the skills compared to an influential, alternative model. The findings' implications are discussed, noting how an empirically validated framework can facilitate understanding of how individuals engage with organizational environments and organizations get their work done.

Exceeding the Ordinary: A Framework for Examining Teams Across the Extremeness Continuum and Its Impact on Future Research

Work teams increasingly face unprecedented challenges in volatile, uncertain, complex, and often ambiguous environments. In response, team researchers have begun to focus more on teams whose work revolves around mitigating risks in these dynamic environments. Some highly insightful contributions to team research and organizational studies have originated from investigating teams that face unconventional or extreme events. Despite this increased attention to extreme teams, however, a comprehensive theoretical framework is missing. We introduce such a framework that envisions team extremeness as a continuous, multidimensional variable consisting of environmental extremeness (i.e., external team context) and task extremeness (i.e., internal team context). The proposed framework allows every team to be placed on the team extremeness continuum, bridging the gap between literature on extreme and more traditional teams. Furthermore, we present six propositions addressing how team extremeness may interact with team processes, emergent states, and outcomes using core variables for team effectiveness and the well-established input–mediator–output–input model to structure our theorizing. Finally, we outline some potential directions for future research by elaborating on temporal considerations (i.e., patterns and trajectories), measurement approaches, and consideration of multilevel relationships involving team extremeness. We hope that our theoretical framework and theorizing can create a path forward, stimulating future research within the organizational team literature to further examine the impact of team extremeness on team dynamics and effectiveness.

Team Adaptation to Discontinuous Task Change: Equity and Equality as Facilitators of Individual and Collective Task Capabilities Redevelopment

Teams often need to adapt to planned discontinuous task change or fundamental alteration of tasks, tools, and work systems. Although team adaptation theories have made substantive progress in explaining how teams can respond to change, they have not adequately considered the unique impact that discontinuous task change can have on teams. Such change can render not only collective but also individual task capabilities obsolete and necessitate a multilevel task relearning process. Drawing on the team compilation model, we suggest that adaptation to discontinuous task change is akin to team (re)development. We posit that teams are more effective when they approach discontinuous task change by first focusing on the rebuilding of individual task capabilities and only later shifting their attention to the rebuilding of team-level task capabilities. Moreover, we argue that the uncertainty caused by discontinuous task change makes reward fairness salient such that equity and equality in rewards are particularly useful in motivating members to (re)develop individual and collective task capabilities, respectively. We provide support for these arguments using survey, qualitative, and archival data from 115 manufacturing teams and discuss the implications of our findings for both research and practice.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.1621 .

The influence of team workload on team performance in the light of task complexity: a study of nuclear fire brigades

The aim of our experiment was to explore the effect of perceived team workload on team performance among nuclear fire brigades of the Hungarian Nuclear Power Plant. Our sample consisted of 6 firefighting teams (N = 42) who were involved in two high-fidelity simulated scenarios with different task complexity. Team workload was measured by NASA Task Load Index, while team performance was evaluated by a team of experts. Our results showed that teams generally managed to maintain a standard performance in both cases, although they perceived there to be a higher workload during the complex scenario. Our results further revealed that perceived 'Physical demand' and 'Effort' factors contributed to the increased level of workload in the complex task. Finally, in case of the simple simulated scenario, workload and team performance were not related to each other, while the two were positively correlated in the complex scenario.

An Improved Logistic Regression Method for Assessing the Performance of Track and Field Sports

Track and field is an important part of sports. Track and field athletes are an important reserve force for the development of national sports. An accurate assessment of track and field athletes' performance can help them develop more appropriate training programs and improve their performance. In order to assess the performance of track and field athletes better, this paper proposes an improved logistic regression method. Firstly, this method uses factor analysis to reduce the data dimensions of the factors that affect the performance of track and field athletes, and uses the principal component analysis to select common factors and their corresponding values. Then, according to the common factors, a binary logistic regression model is established to evaluate the performance of track and field athletes. Experiments show that the method can effectively evaluate the performance of track and field athletes and is suitable for athletes of different track and field sports. It has high accuracy, fast evaluation efficiency, and good universality of performance evaluation. For different numbers of athletes, the proposed method has a lower error evaluation index, higher evaluation accuracy, and better evaluation quality. Compared with the other two methods, the proposed method has the shortest evaluation time and is more effective for the performance evaluation of track and field athletes.

Status Competition and Implicit Coordination: Based on the Role of Knowledge Sharing and Psychological Safety

Implicit coordination is an important research topic in the field of social cognition. Previous studies have studied implicit coordination behavior from the perspective of team mental model but ignored the internal mechanism of individual status competition motivation on implicit coordination behavior. Based on the differences of status competition motivation, the individual status competition motivation is divided into prestige-type and dominant-type. With knowledge sharing as the mediating variable and psychological safety as the moderating variable, this research constructed a process model of the influence of status competition motivation on implicit coordination behavior. The empirical study was carried out with a sample of 367 employees of 44 enterprises. The research results show the following findings: (1) Status competition has a differentiated impact on implicit coordination. Prestige-type status competition has a significant positive impact on implicit coordination behavior, while dominant-type status competition has a significant negative impact on implicit coordination behavior. (2) Knowledge sharing plays a mediating role between status competition (prestige-type status competition and dominant-type status competition) and implicit coordination. (3) Psychological safety positively moderates the relationship between prestige-type status competition, dominant-type status competition, and knowledge sharing. The research results provide a new perspective for the field of implicit coordination; reveal the mechanism of status competition motivation in implicit coordination, which is of great significance to the practice of enterprise team management and human resource management.

Employee-(ro)bot collaboration in service: an interdependence perspective

Purpose

Collaboration between frontline employees (FLEs) and frontline robots (FLRs) is expected to play a vital role in service delivery in these increasingly disrupted times. Firms are facing the challenge of designing effective FLE-FLR collaborations to enhance customer experience. This paper develops a framework to explore the potential of FLE-FLR collaboration through the lens of interdependence in customer service experience and advances research that specifically focuses on employee-robot team development.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper uses a conceptual approach rooted in the interdependence theory, team design, management, robotics and automation literature.

Findings

This paper proposes and defines the Frontline employee – Frontline robot interdependence (FLERI) concept based on three structural components of an interdependent relationship – joint goal, joint workflow and joint decision-making authority. It also provides propositions that outline the potential impact of FLERI on customer experience and employee performance, and outline several boundary conditions that could enhance or inhibit those effects.

Practical implications

Managerial insights into designing an employee-robot team in service delivery are provided.

Originality/value

This study is the first to propose a novel conceptual framework (FLERI) that focuses on the notion of human-robot collaboration in service settings.

Examining Multiteam Systems Across Context and Type: A Historiometric Analysis of Failed MTS Performance

Multiteam systems (MTSs) are complex organizational forms comprising interdependent teams that work towards their own proximal goals within and across teams to also accomplish a shared superordinate goal. MTSs operate within high-stakes, dangerous contexts with high consequences for suboptimal performance. We answer calls for nuanced exploration and cross-context comparison of MTSs “in the wild” by leveraging the MTS action sub-phase behavioral taxonomy to determine where and how MTS failures occur. To our knowledge, this is the first study to also examine how key MTS attributes (boundary status, goal type) influence MTS processes and performance. We conducted historiometric analysis on 40 cases of failed MTS performance across various contexts (e.g., emergency response, commercial transportation, military, and business) to uncover patterns of within- and between-team behaviors of failing MTSs, resulting in four themes. First, component teams of failing MTSs over-engaged in within-team alignment behaviors (vs. between-team behaviors) by enacting acting, monitoring, and recalibrating behaviors more often within than between teams. Second, failing MTSs over-focused on acting behaviors (vs. monitoring or recalibrating) and tended to not fully enact the action sub-phase cycle. Third and fourth, boundary status and goal type exacerbated these behavioral patterns, as external and physical MTSs were less likely to enact sufficient between-team behaviors or fully enact the action sub-phase cycle compared to internal and intellectual MTSs. We propose entrainment as a mechanism for facilitating MTS performance wherein specific, cyclical behavioral patterns enacted by teams align to facilitate goal achievement via three multilevel behavioral cycles (i.e., acting-focused, alignment-focused, and adjustment-focused). We argue that the degree to which these cycles are aligned both between teams and with the overarching MTS goal determines whether and how an MTS fails. Our findings add nuance beyond single-context MTS studies by showing that the identified behavioral patterns hold both across contexts and almost all types of MTS action-phase behaviors. We show that these patterns vary by MTS boundary status and goal type. Our findings inform MTS training best practices, which should be structured to integrate all component teams and tailored to both MTS attributes (i.e., boundary status, goal type) and situation type (e.g., contingency planning).

Exploring the effects of team coordination and power distance on effective software process tailoring: a theoretical perspective

Purpose

Software process tailoring (SPT) plays a critical role in contemporary software development. Because SPT determines how a software project proceeds, its effectiveness should be investigated. Specifically, SPT is a collaborative yet highly conflictual process, and the existing literature has paid little or no attention to how team members coordinate and to how power distance (PD) influences coordination under this conflictual situation for the purpose of fostering SPT effectiveness.

Design/methodology/approach

A propositional research method is utilized by reviewing the extant literature regarding SPT, team coordination and PD. Accordingly, several propositions are developed to theorize the contributive and moderating effects of team coordinative capabilities and PD on SPT effectiveness.

Findings

This study advances the understanding of the underlying mechanisms of the four distinct coordination capabilities in performing SPT, which will help software firms comprehend the moderating effects of PD on the relationships among coordinative capabilities and SPT effectiveness.

Originality/value

This study extends coordination theory and reveals four coordination capabilities that nurture SPT effectiveness. Moreover, this study demonstrates how power plays a role in the coordination of a team through the collaborative yet divergent SPT decision process to yield an integrative tailoring solution. In particular, we take a fresh viewpoint of PD considering the member-member relationship in exploring its moderating effects in the SPT context.

The Effects of Team Mental Model Complexity on Team Information Search and Performance Trajectories

Drawing on the concept of requisite complexity, we propose that mental model complexity is crucial for teams to thrive in dynamic complex environments. Using a longitudinal research design, we examined the influence of team mental model complexity on team information search and performance trajectories in a sample of 64 teams competing in a business strategy simulation over time. We found that team information search positively influences performance growth over time. More specifically, and consistent with requisite complexity, we found that mental model complexity positively influences both performance growth and information search over time, above and beyond the effects of mental model similarity and accuracy.

Understanding how team process-sequences emerge over time and their relationship to team performance

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to explore the team process-sequences executed within and across performance episodes and their relation to team performance. In doing so, this effort responds to the call for examining the temporal and dynamic aspects of teams.

Design/methodology/approach

Data (i.e. observations and audio recordings) was collected from the stand-up meetings of three high-performing Scrum teams across six points in time during two consecutive performance episodes (i.e. beginning, midpoint, end). After content coding the data, lag sequential analyses was used to examine patterns of executed team processes to determine whether particular process-sequences occurred significantly different from others.

Findings

Teams shifted between transition and action phase processes during performance episodes. During and across performance episodes, process-sequences primarily consisted of transition processes. When teams executed process-sequences consisting solely of action phase processes, their focus was on monitoring processes.

Research limitations/implications

This study hopes that the findings here will serve to spur researchers to more fully investigate the relationship between process-sequences and team performance across various team types. However, limitations (e.g. small sample size, unknown point of teams’ life cycle and focus on explicit team processes) should be taken into account when building on the present findings.

Originality/value

This study contributes to a better understanding of the temporal and dynamic nature of team processes by analyzing how the team process and process-sequences occur across time. In addition, this study moves beyond most studies that assess team processes as static retrospective perceptions and consider their natural ordering.

The Effect of a Concept Mapping Intervention on Shared Cognition and Adaptive Team Performance Over Time

Research has demonstrated the value of team adaptation for organizational teams. However, empirical work on interventions that teams can take to increase adaptive team performance is scarce. In response, this study proposes a concept mapping intervention as a way to increase teams’ ability to adapt following a task change. Particularly, this study examines the effect of a concept mapping intervention on team transition adaptation (the drop in performance after a change) and reacquisition adaptation (the slope of performance after the change) via its effect on task mental models and transactive memory systems. We conducted a longitudinal experimental study of 44 three-person teams working on an emergency management simulation. Findings suggest that the concept mapping intervention promotes reacquisition adaptation, task mental models, and transactive memory systems. Results also suggest that task mental models mediate the effect of the concept mapping intervention on reacquisition adaptation. A post hoc analysis suggests that the concept mapping intervention is only effective if it leads to high task mental model accuracy. Our study presents concept mapping as a practical intervention to promote shared cognition and reacquisition adaptation.

Effects of ICT Shared Mental Models on Team Processes and Outcomes

Although existing studies have shown that shared mental models of information and communication technology (ICT shared mental models) are related to better computer-mediated teamwork, causal effects on team processes and outcomes remain unclear. This study analyzes the effects of ICT shared mental models on team effectiveness indicators via ICT use and team communication. Results based on 69 three-person teams show that manipulated ICT shared mental models significantly influence team performance, coordination effectiveness, and affective team commitment, partially mediated by consistent ICT use in a team and team communication. Study results extend findings on antecedents, mechanisms, and effects of ICT shared mental models.

Teams in the wild are not extinct, but challenging to research: A guide for conducting impactful team field research with 10 recommendations and 10 best practices

While there is no shortage of calls for research to study management concepts within organizations, there is far too little guidance on how to accomplish this feat. Conducting research in the field is especially important within the domain of organizational team research. Accordingly, we seek to provide an understanding of the current state of the organizational team field research literature and highlight recommendations and best practices. As such, we identified 10 recommendations and 10 best practices through three methods: (1) a literature review, (2) a survey of individuals who have published team field research, as well as some of the most impactful scholars investigating organizational team phenomenon, and (3) a set of interviews with practitioners in positions that can grant field access to researchers. By implementing this multi-pronged approach, we were able to incorporate multiple stakeholder voices so as to fully understand the value and ideal process for scientist-practitioner endeavors.

Belonging and Social Integration as Factors of Well-Being in Latin America and Latin Europe Organizations

Background

Studies and meta-analyses found individual, meso and micro-social factors that are associated with individual well-being, as well as a positive socio-emotional climate or collective well-being.

Aim

This article simultaneously studies and examines these factors of well-being.

Method

Well-Being is measured as a dependent variable at the individual and collective level, as well as the predictors, in three cross-sectional and one longitudinal studies. Education and social intervention workers (N = 1300, K = 80) from Chile, Spain and Uruguay participate; a subsample of educators (k = 1, n = 37) from the south central Chile and from Chile, Uruguay and Spain (n = 1149); workers from organizations in Latin America and Southern Europe, military cadets from Argentina (N < 1000); and teams (K = 14) from Spanish companies.

Results

Individual and collective well-being indicators were related, suggesting that the emotional climate as a context improves personal well-being. Individual factors (emotional creativity and openness and universalism values), psychosocial factors (low stress, control over work and social support supervisors and peers) were positively associated with personal well-being in education and social intervention context. Organizational dynamic or transformational culture is directly and indirectly associated with individual well-being through previously described psychosocial factors. Group processes such as internal communication and safe participation, task orientation or climate of excellence as well as leadership style that reinforces participation and belonging, were positively associated with collective well-being in labor and military context and predict team work socio-emotional climate in a longitudinal study- but were unrelated to individual well-being. Transformational leadership plays a mediating role between functional factors and social-emotional climate in work teams. Organizational role autonomy, functional organizational leadership, integration and resources were associated with collective well-being in organizations. Organizational leadership moderates the relationship between task orientation and collective well-being in military context.

Conclusion

Individual and microsocial factors influence personal well-being. Meso level factors favorable to well-being through processes which reinforce social belonging, influence directly collective well-being and indirectly personal well-being. Leadership that reinforces participation and belonging play a central role for emotional climate. Stress and emotional climate playing an important pivotal role for psychological well-being.

Relationship between Perceived Teamwork Effectiveness and Team Performance in Banking Sector of Serbia

Teamwork is one of the most important factors for business success in the modern economy. In almost every area of business, teams receive more and more attention, since it has been found that teamwork leads to greater individual, group, and even organizational performance. The aim of this research is to investigate the effectiveness of teamwork and its relationship with team performances. Specifically, the authors tried to investigate which factors of teamwork effectiveness have a positive relationship with teamwork performance and the sustainability of teams in the future. The subject of the research is the effectiveness of teamwork as a construct that is widely presented in the scientific field of organizational behavior and human resource management, but is still underexplored in empirical research, especially in the banking sector. An investigation with a self-audit questionnaire on teamwork effectiveness was conducted on a sample of 401 employees in the banking sector in Serbia, in 16 out of the 26 existing banks in the country. The authors used SmartPLS software in order to test the questionnaire (indicator loadings, internal consistency reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity) and proposed research question (PLS-SEM). The results showed that factors such as innovative behavior of the team members, the quality of teamwork, and teamwork synergy have positive relations to teamwork performance. This paper contributes to the better understanding of the factors of teamwork effectiveness that contribute to team performances, with respect to the banking industry in Serbia. The limitation of the paper is the size of the sample, with respect to the total population.

The Joint Effects of Leadership Style and Magnitude of the Disruption on Team Adaptation: A Longitudinal Experiment

Here, we report a longitudinal experiment testing the combined effects of leadership style and the magnitude of the disruption on team adaptive performance over time. We hypothesized that teams led by a directive leader would outperform teams led by an empowering leader when task conditions do not change (pre-change), while teams with an empowering leader would outperform teams with a directive leader under changing task conditions (post-change), especially when task changes are high in magnitude. To test our hypotheses, we conducted a 2 (leadership: directive/empowering) x 2 (magnitude of the disruption: low/high) experiment with repeated measures of team performance before and after the change occurred. Sixty-seven three-member teams participated in a computer-based firefighting simulation. Evidence from discontinuous growth modeling partially supported our hypotheses by showing that before the task change, directively led teams outperformed teams led by an empowering leader. After the task change, however, directively led teams still outperformed teams with empowering leaders. The magnitude of the disruption had a significant main effect on team adaptive performance but did not significantly moderate the effect of leadership style. Implications for the team adaptation literature and the management of teams under complex, changing conditions are discussed.

Team Collective Intelligence in Dynamically Complex Projects—A Shipbuilding Case

In concurrent engineering projects driven by short delivery times, team performance rests on the team’s capability to quickly and effectively handle different, emergent issues. We conducted an exploratory study of a large, dynamically complex project in which team members had a record of “good problem-solving abilities.” The study revealed how the team members demonstrated a collective ability to swiftly handle emergent issues, which again decreased the intensity of time and performance pressure. Beyond formal processes combined with lean practices, supporting this ability were situation awareness, task-based subgroups, direct lines of communication, and trust.