Resource Center

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.

In this paper, making use of a national sample of 110 interdisciplinary teams in geriatrics from 34 Veterans Affairs Medical Centers, we examine the effects of team members' embeddedness in their team network and in their own discipline networks on the level of team development, the quality of team functioning, and the degree of burnout in team members. In addition, we examine the effects of team development on the quality of team functioning and the degree of stress and burnout in team members.
Although time constraints usually limit professionals to being embedded in either their interdisciplinary teams or their disciplines, the two types of embeddedness are not necessarily mutually exclusive. For example, a nurse on a nursing home care team may be highly embedded in both the team network and the nursing network. At the other extreme, a member could be weakly embedded in both networks. For example, a dietitian responsible for several units may be moving from network to network all day, and may consult and socialize with persons who are neither members of her own discipline nor members of one particular team. Thus, embeddedness in one's own discipline and embeddedness in a team network are variables that should be examined separately.