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This paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Interdisciplinary Health Team Care Conference, which took place September 22-24, 1994 in Chicago, Illinois.  It is reproduced here with the permission of the authors.

Although self-directed work teams are being adopted in health care settings, their application to interdisciplinary health care teams is rare. This paper reviews the characteristics of SDWTs and IHTs in the context of the Total Quality Movement and the changing health care environment. It identifies differences and similarities, offers suggestions for using SDWT concepts in training for practice on IHTs, and also suggests how lessons learned from IHTs might be applied to SDWTs.