ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with some factors that need to be considered by researchers and practitioners when assessing performance in organizational teams. By way of illustration, we describe the nature and activities of teams in hospital environments. Hospitals provide fascinating portrayals of individuals, placed into different kinds of work arrangements, who integrate their activities in various ways to produce effective collective and organized responses. Often, these actions occur through split-second coordination where the results have literal life and death implications. Hospitals are likely to be divided into groupings that represent different functional activities. Each of these groups may be subdivided into smaller groups also differentiated by function, albeit more specialized than the larger groupings. Also, some teams (e.g., surgical teams) are ad hoc ones that come together for a limited period of time and for a specific purpose and then disband. Still others, such as nursing teams, are loose configurations where each member has a specialized function and their organization into a team is designed to facilitate the rotation of personnel to different performance settings (Denison & Sutton, 1990). Finally, the hospital as a whole may be directed by a top management team (Cohen, 1990).
