Can team coaching provide healthcare the remedy it needs?

ABSTRACT

The healthcare industry is inadvertently a teamwork industry – and yet – little time is devoted to improving teamwork on the field. As a response to this issue, team development intervention (TDI) tools have flourished. Findings suggest the capability for TDIs to better team competencies, and potentially mitigate prominent healthcare problems. However, team coaching has been excluded as a potential TDI for healthcare. For this reason, we seek to 1) discuss existing team coaching models, integrating findings across the literature, 2) highlight the advantages of Hackman and Wageman (2005)’s model over others, 3) display its empirically-corroborated propositions, and finally, 4) provide general guidance on how to move forward. We move beyond extant literature by providing an outline on what outcomes team coaching can and cannot yield, accumulating evidence from fields outside of healthcare and incorporating team coaching into the TDI literature. By doing so, we hope empirical research on team coaching is incentivized, resulting in an efficient and accessible TDI for healthcare professionals and the field of interprofessional care.

KEYWORDS:

• team coaching
• healthcare teams
• psychological safety
• teamwork dynamics
• Communication

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

All authors contributed to the development, writing, and review of the manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by the U.S. Army Research Institute (ARI) for the Behavioral and Social Sciences and was accomplished under Cooperative Agreement Number W911NF-19-2-0173. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the US Army Research Institute (ARI) for the Behavioral and Social Sciences or the US Government. This work was also partially supported by the Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences (UT Health Science Center, Houston, TX), which is funded by National Institutes of Health Clinical and Translational Award UL1 TR003167 from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences or the National Institutes of Health. Rice University and University of Texas Health Sciences Center Houston are partners in this grant.

Notes on contributors

Gabriela Fernández Castillo

Gabriela Fernández Castillo is a Ph.D. Student in Industrial-Organizational Psychology at Rice University. She holds her B.A. in Psychology and International Studies from Baylor University. Her research interests include efficiency, teamwork, team coaching, and human-computer interactions.

Eduardo Salas

Dr. Eduardo Salas is a Allyn R. & Gladys M. Cline Professor in Psychology at Rice University. His research interests are in uncovering what facilitates teamwork and team effectiveness in organizations; how and why does team training work; how to optimize simulation-based training; how to design, implement and evaluate training & development systems, and in generating evidence-based guidance for those in practice.