Health care delivery in many countries has expanded over the past 150 years from a largely social service delivered by individual practitioners to an intricate network of services provided by teams of professionals. The problems of increasing resource consumption, financial constraints, complexity, and poor system design that have emerged as consequences of these changes have exacerbated many o...

the article discusses a trial undertaken in a lis education program to help prepare students from different cultural backgrounds to work in virtual, multicultural work places.  the focus of the trial was developing teamwork, which may now involve global, multicultural and virtual components, for which students need to be prepared, given work place changes of recent years. the trial took place i...

Although social work participation on interdisciplinary teams is long-standing, little research has been done to examine its effectiveness. This study used the Index of Interdisciplinary Collaboration to explore relationships between selected variables and teamwork in the hospice setting. The findings indicate that hospice social workers report a high level of interdisciplinary collaboration wi...

A growing number of companies organize their activities in virtual settings The reasons for the introduction of virtual teams vary but managers often mention the possibility of crossing distances and time zones in order to get closer to new markets and customers. Another driver for the establishment of virtual teams is the opportunity for gathering together rare expertise rather than solely rel...

We study the interaction between a group of agents who exert costly effort over time to complete a project, and a manager who chooses the objectives that must be met in order for her to sign off on it. The manager has limited commitment power so that she can commit to the requirements only when the project is sufficiently close to completion. This is common in projects that involve design or qu...

Effective mental health care requires a high performing, interprofessional team. Among 79 mental health teams in Quebec (Canada), this exploratory study aims to 1) determine the association between work role performance and a wide range of variables related to team effectiveness according to the literature, and to 2) using structural equation modelling, assess the covariance between each of the...

How should human operators interact with teams of mobile agents, whose movements are dictated by decentralized and localized interaction laws? This chapter connects the structure of the underlying information exchange network to how easy or hard it is for human operators to influence the behavior of the team. “Influence” is understood both in terms of controllability, which is a point-to-point ...

In this paper we investigate the effects that team size has on geographically distributed teams within a large, multi-national manufacturing organization. Survey responses from 109 members of distributed teams indicate that compared to members of larger teams, members of smaller teams participated more actively on their team, were more committed to their team, were more aware of the goals of th...

One of the first steps in the planning of a new engineering project in industry is its partition into subtasks and the configuration of a work team to execute it. This decision making process is typically performed by a project manager based on his/her past experience and the available (though frequently scarce, uncertain and dynamic) information about the cognitive and personal characteristics...

While spatial boundaries include the geographic differences among team members (e.g., different cities), temporal boundaries include the workday differences among team members (e.g., different time zones). In global teams, members have to deal with both spatial and temporal boundaries, since their co-workers are often located in cities within and across time zones. For global team members with ...