Why online medical teams disband? The role of team diversity and leadership type

PurposeOnline medical teams (MTs), involving collaboration between remote healthcare workers, can provide comprehensive and rapid healthcare to patients. The growth in MTs is continuing, with popularity growing among doctors and patients, but some MTs disband, which could break the continuity of healthcare services provided. We aim to address this pressing issue by exploring the effects of team diversity and leadership types on team status (i.e. team disbandment (TD)). This paper systematically investigates the influences of team diversity, including separation, variety and disparity diversity and the effects of leadership types, including strong, equal and weak types.Design/methodology/approachA data set consisting 1,071 online MTs was collected from the Good Doctor website, a leading Chinese online health community (OHC), on January 10, 2018. The data captured included 206 teams which disbanded after 3 months collaboration. Logistic regression and maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) were used to examine their effects.FindingsThe results show that variety diversity, related to departments, positively affects TD, but disparity diversity, referring to clinician titles, negatively affects TD. Separation diversity, in terms of team member attitudes, exerts a negligible influence on disbandment. Although strong and equal leadership types negatively influence TD, they are seen to strengthen the positive effect of variety diversity, suggesting stable structure combinations of strong or equal-type leadership and low department diversity, as well as the match of weak-type leadership and high department diversity.Originality/valueThis paper extends the current understanding of virtual teams and OHCs by examining the role of leadership types and team diversity, and their influencing role on team status. The pairwise combinations are obtained to effectively reduce the disbandment probability of medical teams operating in OHCs, which could help platform managers, team founders and those connected with MTs deal with the team-disbandment crisis, providing both theoretical and practical implications to healthcare providers and researchers alike.

Why online medical teams disband? The role of team diversity and leadership type

Background Medical teams (MTs) online can provide comprehensive and rapid healthcare services to patients through doctors’ collaboration. The growth of MTs continues with their increasing popularity among doctors and patients, but there also exists some disbanded MTs, which would break the continuity of healthcare services. We aim to addressing this pressing issue by exploring effects of team diversity and leadership types on the team status (i.e. team disbandment). Specifically, we classify team diversity into separation diversity, variety diversity and disparity diversity, and leadership types based on the clinical titles include strong, equal and weak types. Methods A dataset of 1,071 MTs online were traced from the Good Doctor Online, a leading online health community (OHC) in China on January 10, 2018, and 206 teams disbanded after 3 months. Logistic regression and Maximize Likelihood Estimation were used to examine their effects. Results Our findings suggest that variety diversity related to the departments positively affected team disbandment, but disparity diversity referring to the clinical titles negatively affected team disbandment. Separation diversity in terms of the members’ attitude exerted a negligible influence on team disbandment. Although strong and equal leadership negatively influenced team disbandment, they strengthened the positive effect of variety diversity, suggesting the stable structure matching of strong/equal-type leadership and low department diversity, and the matching of weak-type leadership and high department diversity. Conclusion This study focuses on effects of leadership types and team diversity, and their pairwise combinations are obtained to effectively reduce the disbandment probability of medical teams in OHCs. It could help platforms, team founders, and all those connected with MTs positively deal with the team disbandment crisis. Theoretical and practical implications in OHCs and limitations were discussed.