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This paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Interdisciplinary Health Team Care Conference, which took place September 28-30, 1983 in Rochester, New York.  It is reproduced here with the permission of the authors.

The work reported in this paper stems from the belief that our understanding of the dynamics by which status characteristics affect the structure of working relationships emerging in particular groups of health care professionals is confused and incomplete. This is primarily because characteristics of the empirical' settings in which such groups typically work that provide other sources of information about "legitimate" behavior, i.e., how people ought to behave in relation to each other are ignored, thereby confounding the effects of status dynamics with the effects of characteristics of those settings that also affect the structure of the working relationships that emerges.

In this paper, the theoretical distinctions between status reasoning and legitimation reasoning are outlined first. Second, a way of looking at working relationships that distinguishes aspects of relationship more subject to structuring by status from those that are more subject to the criteria established in particular work settings is presented. In particular, these aspects of relationship focus on how people organize to complete the tasks they are given. Third, a laboratory experiment is presented that illustrates various modes for organizing working relationships to accomplish a task, linking these to the overall quality of the group's performance. Finally, the two lines of reasoning are used to create alternative sets of predictions for the behavior of four multidisciplinary teams of health professionals working together in the context of a field experiment, whose group behavior was videotaped, coded and analyzed. The patterns of behavior that emerge are linked to the quality of patient care outcomes achieved by these teams over a year's time.