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Keywords Teams, Effectiveness, Organizations, Assessment Health care, United Kingdom
Abstract Much has been said and written about the importance of teams to the success of organisations and emphasis has been given to the benefits of team-building activities to achieving both team and organisational effectiveness. Describes attempts to move beyond team budding and to fink organisational development to team effectiveness in a coherent way. In order to achieve this goal, a team effectiveness audit tool has been devised which is based on individual self-assessment. The audit tool focuses on six domains considered to be important in effective teams. The self-report audit tool has now been used by over 140 team across a range of public-sector organisations and this has enabled a significant database to be built up. This provides a Large normative data set against which individual team performance can be gauged Focuses on data derived from 37 teams within an integrated acute and community health and social services (HSS) trust Overall the team effectiveness audit tool has been well received and has proven to be an effective mechanism of linking individual and team performance with organisational-management objectives.
Introduction
Following the reorganisation of. the National Health Service (NHS), hierarchical command and control structures were viewed as insufficient to meet the demands of the patient/client population. Within Down Lisburn Trust, our response to these demands was to develop an integrated care model (Doman, 1996) for the delivery of services, which promoted managerial accountability at an operational level. This development over the past few years highlighted the increasing importance of teams and their performance as a critical component of the delivery of health and social care. More recently, the Department of Health (1998) also acknowledged the importance of team development within the general thrust of the Health Service Clinical Governance agenda. Indeed Vincent (1995) highlighted the critical importance of understanding team processes and developing clinical leadership in order to deliver clinical quality.
Down Lisburn Trust, in common with other health- and social-care providers, had experienced a number of pressures which highlighted the need for continuing improvement, increasing service demand against a background of resource constraints. In addition the need for greater integration of working practices and flatter management structures had caused a review of team practices. Devolved...