Unit-based teams (UBTs)-defined as natural work groups of physicians, managers, and frontline staff who work collaboratively to solve problems, improve performance, and enhance quality-were established by the 2005 national agreement between Kaiser Permanente (KP) and the Coalition of KP Unions. They use established performance-improvement techniques and employee-engagement principles (including...

This study focuses on healthcare for the elderly under the Family Health Strategy in three municipalities (counties) in the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, specifically analyzing the organization of the healthcare network and the knowledge of six health teams, using interviews and focus groups. The study emphasized the central role of work by community health agents, the prioritization of prog...

Virtual teams often face tight schedules and a need to start quickly and perform instantly. The goal of our study was to enhance understanding of the challenges faced by such teams. We used time–interaction–performance theory as the framework for following the processes and functions within virtual teams working on a systems development task. Our study provided a detailed examination of the gro...

Cooperative learning has gained popularity in higher educational settings. However, assigning grades equitably to all team members in a way that rewards them for their contributions remains challenging. In this paper, we ask whether having free riders on a team lowers the quality of submitted work, and whether students’ course performance correlates with peer evaluations. In an introductory soc...

Although globalization has been a political and economic concern for centuries (see Distributed Work, reviewed below) its impact on the engineering education community has become particularly salient since the publication of the Engineer of 2020 (NAE, 2003), Educating the Engineer of 2020 (NAE, 2005) and The World is Flat (Friedman, 2005). These and subsequent publications have emphasized the c...

This review examines recent research on groups and teams, giving special emphasis to research investigating factors that influence the effectiveness of teams at work in organizations. Several performance-relevant factors are considered, including group composition, cohesiveness, and motivation, although certain topics (e.g. composition) have been more actively researched than others in recent y...

As the necessity for teams to implement different innovations is prominent, the study addresses the question of the effect of team autonomy on teams' innovation implementation. Team autonomy is usually considered as a beneficial job characteristic but it is still unclear whether it aligns with the necessity to make teams implement new technologies, work methods or other innovations. We argue fo...

Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) are subjective, interactive and relative, thus realizing the need for particular NFR is by itself a challenge. Furthermore understanding what the software must implement in order to cope with these needs may prove to be an even more challenging task. One way of addressing the need for help on NFR elicitation is the use of catalogues. However, it is not clear ho...

The search engine Google uses the PageRanks of webpages to determine the order in which they are displayed as the result of a web search. In this work we expand Google’s idea of webpage ranking to ranking National Football League teams. We think of the teams as webpages and use the statistics of a football season to create the connections (links) between the teams. The objective is to be able t...