Erin Barry

By Neil E. Grunberg and Erin S. Barry

Effective healthcare requires meaningful teamwork among individuals who have diverse knowledge, expertise, experiences, and perspectives. Members of multidisciplinary healthcare teams include many different healthcare professionals—including physicians, nurses, dentists, psychologists, nutritionists, physical therapists, social workers, technicians, researchers, staff, and administrators—as well as patients and their significant others. For multidisciplinary healthcare teams to work effectively and efficiently, it is important to understand teams, members of teams, team processes, relevant principles and practices of leadership and followership, and how to create and maintain high performing teams. This chapter describes each of these concepts; how to assess and develop team members; and how to integrate and apply three particular leadership/followership approaches to optimize or “AID” multidisciplinary healthcare teamwork: adaptive/allostatic, innovative, and distributed/shared/collective leadership and followership. In addition, this chapter discusses how to optimize cohesiveness, morale, performance, and communication of multidisciplinary healthcare teams in the ever-changing contexts in which they work.

Part of the book: Multi-Disciplinary Teamwork in the Healthcare Setting [Working title]