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This paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the First Annual Interdisciplinary Teams in Primary Care Conference, which took place May 3-5, 1979 in Seattle, Washington.  It is reproduced here with the permission of the authors.

This paper attempts to examine the role relationships on the interdisciplinary health care teams at the University of Nevada, Reno in the light of data obtained from an analysis of the communication behavior of these teams.
Since teams and their members are seen as parts of a complex system, one of the major efforts of the Team-TRAC longitudinal research project was to apply a systems perspective to the study of roles on health care teams. Seen in this manner, roles can be defined by the kind of interaction that occurs between members of the team as they interact together and as they deal with outside environments.