Resource Center

This paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the Eigth Annual Interdisciplinary Health Team Care Conference, which took place September 18-20, 1986 at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.  It is reproduced here with the permission of the authors.

Because of its long involvement with interdisciplinary education as well as the particular set of circumstances surrounding the conception and funding of the Interdisciplinary Team Training Research and Curriculum Project (Team-TRAC), the University of Nevada, Reno, adopted a broad, mixed, integrative faculty team development model. At the same time, there was recognition of a need to promote teamwork in the conduct of the separate functions of clinical care, teaching, consulting and management.
Later, the Nevada group described an additional area of team function and collaboration around the activities of research and evaluation (Thornton et al., 1979). Thus, while Baldwin and Edinberg's original topology attempted to differentiate between the various goals and functions of those faculty teams involved specifically in student training, it was clearly recognized that, within any team, there may be specific subsets of functions and tasks that call for teamwork in their performance and achievement. The need for the overall team to recognize and deal specifically with these component functions and tasks is regarded as a significant observation in the ongoing development of a theory of health teams. In other words, health teams, whatever their mission or setting, have specific subsets of goals, roles and tasks, each of which calls for teamwork in its own right and must be addressed in the same way as are the overall goals, roles and tasks of the larger team. Whether or not the team as a whole delegates these particular subsets of functions and objectives to a particular person or subgroup or decides to deal with them as a total group may have significant implications for issues of trust, energy, and effectiveness.