Antecedents enabling team ambidexterity: moving beyond mere microfoundation

PurposeAmbidexterity in teams represents powerful dynamic capabilities for innovation and adaptation in rapidly changing environments. This study focused on the emerging concept of team ambidexterity. Primary purposes were to consolidate emerging research on ambidexterity within teams and to synthesise antecedent inputs.Design/methodology/approachThis study applied a systematic content-based review method to collect articles relevant to enabling ambidexterity within teams. The study integrated relevant studies on ambidexterity and on teams and teamwork. It analysed content through theoretical frameworks of ambidexterity and dynamic capabilities.FindingsTeam ambidexterity constitutes a distinct and increasingly important organisational concept beyond just supporting firm-level ambidexterity. Team ambidexterity depends on inputs that can include ambidexterity's multilevel, generic mechanisms and additional team-centric inputs specially characterising teams.Practical implicationsOrganisational leaders need insights into the valuable potential of ambidextrous teams that can increase innovation and enable successful adaptation at an operational level for longterm survival and competitive advantage in volatile environments. The study highlights the essential inputs for designing and equipping ambidextrous teams.Originality/valueTeam ambidexterity research is growing, but so far it has mostly addressed team ambidexterity as a microfoundation supporting firm-level ambidexterity. Existing studies have remained mostly disparate and unorganized. This study appears unique in having identified and synthesised studies most relevant to developing ambidexterity within teams. The study articulated a more comprehensive understanding of team ambidexterity, derived a novel set of team-centric inputs and analysed ambidexterity as dynamic capabilities at operational unit level.

Teams in Small Organizations: Conceptual, Methodological, and Practical Considerations

Research on teams and teamwork has flourished in the last few decades. Much of what we know about teams and teamwork comes from research using short-term student teams in the lab, teams in larger organizations, and, more recently, teams in rather unique and extreme environments. The context in which teams operate influences team composition, processes, and effectiveness. Small organizations are an understudied and often overlooked context that presents a rich opportunity to augment our understanding of teams and team dynamics. In this paper, we discuss how teams and multi-team systems in small organizations may differ from those found in larger organizations. Many of these differences present both methodological and practical challenges to studying team composition and processes in small complex organizational settings. We advocate for applying and accepting new and less widely used methodological approaches to advance our understanding of the science of teams and teamwork in such contexts.

Creating Metrics for Human-Agent Teams

This paper describes the requirements and overall design of a testbed for a human-agent team. A robust, flexible testbed will enable researchers to evaluate the effectiveness of human-agent teaming concepts and issues. In the testbed, MazeWorld, multiple agents play different roles in which tasks are interdependent. Each role can be served by a human or an autonomous agent. Metrics were developed to capture individual and team effectiveness and allow researchers to compare different types of teams and teamwork protocols. Examples of the current task design are presented with the discussion of the future development of the system.

Interprofessional Perceptions and Attitudes Among Pharmacy and Family Nurse Practitioner Students

Introduction: Interprofessional education (IPE) activities involving pharmacy (PharmD) and family nurse practitioner (FNP) students is understudied. Interactions between PharmD and FNP students have become important since most recent Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education standards included a requirement for schools of pharmacy to have IPE. The primary objective of this study is to evaluate the perceptions and attitudes among PharmD and FNP students towards an IPE activity. Methods: Atleast 1 student from each discipline was assigned to one team and participated in simulated ambulatory care scenarios. A survey was completed by students after the activity, which mapped each survey statement to an Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) core competency. Results: Perceptions and attitudes between PharmD and FNP students were similar, with no significant differences except with 2 statements, one survey statement in the Teams and Teamwork core competency and another in the Roles/Responsibilities core competency. A less favorable response with more than half of FNP students reporting “strongly agree” (18%) and “agree” (35%) resulted for the statement regarding their professional roles in the IPE activity. Conclusion: PharmD and FNP students reported favorable perceptions and attitudes in each IPEC core competency after participation in the IPE activity. There may be a need to review the discipline’s professional role before participating in the activity.

Getting underneath IPEC competencies: Core Competency 4: Teams and teamwork

The Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) formed in 2009 provided significant guidance to advance interprofessional collaboration in its publication of the IPEC competencies in 2011, which described Four Domains and associated competencies to address interprofessional education and practice. Its updated publication in 2016 included public health and the care of populations and clarified its intent that interprofessional collaboration is the overarching theme of the now renamed 4 Core Domains to 4 Core Competencies. The article examines the literature that correlates with the sub competency statements represented within Core Competency 4: Teams and Teamwork (TT) to identify the underpinnings that support their fulfillment. The TT core statement is broad: “Apply relationship-building values and the principles of team dynamics to perform effectively in different team roles…”. There is also considerable overlap between the sub-competency statements. Though the existing literature describes structural characteristics and behavioral elements of good functioning teams, the repertoire is not collectively accessible and assimilated into a whole, but is fragmented, embedded in multiple sources. The article integrates and assembles the qualities of teams and team-members likely to be successful while getting underneath the competency statements to identify the mechanisms and dispositions that drive those competencies. The exploration begins with the structural components of teams and then proceeds to key attributes of teams and team members. The article provides a nexus to correlate IPEC’s TT’s sub-competencies to yield favorable team functioning from which academic institutions, and health care professionals might enrich their knowledge about what works.

The potential of interprofessional education to translate physiology curricula effectively into future team-based healthcare

Incorporating active interprofessional education (IPE) opportunities into the classroom setting is a potentially effective mechanism to enhance student learning both in the basic sciences and for future interprofessional collaboration. We integrated an IPE exercise into a graduate-level human physiology course at our health sciences center that enrolled physician assistant (PA), physical therapy (PT), and graduate studies students. Our activity adopted and targeted the four Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) competency domains of values/ethics (VE), roles/responsibilities, interprofessional communication, and teams and teamwork (TT). Effectiveness of the training exercise was determined via pre- and postsurveys, which assessed student self-perceptions of IPEC competency domains, as well as student reflections and evaluations of the exercise itself. We noted a significant improvement in each of the targeted IPEC subcompetencies among all of the students, and within both PT and PA groups when analyzed separately. Moreover, a positive correlation was found between the number of previous IPE experiences and presurvey IPEC VE and TT subcompetency ratings. Our discoveries provide an example of broad acquisition of IPE learning within the context of a physiology curriculum. Perhaps more importantly, our findings indicate that a history of IPE training sets the stage for future IPE learning, reflecting a potential for IPE to transform basic physiological principles into team-based practice and improvement in patient outcomes.