SUMMARY This thesis addresses improvement capability at the front lines of healthcare with a focus on interprofessional health care improvement teams who provide care and improve care. The overall aim is to explore high performing clinical microsystems and evaluate interventions to cultivate health care improvement capabilities of frontline interprofessional teams. Methods Descriptive and evaluative study designs were employed in the five studies which comprise this thesis. A total of 495 interprofessional health care providers from a variety of health care contexts in the United States (Study I, II, III & IV) and Sweden (Study V) participated in the studies. The mixed methods research included qualitative observation, interviews, focus groups and surveys analyzed with qualitative manifest content analysis. The quantitative data were analyzed with statistics appropriate for non-parametric data. Findings Study I and II describe how leaders who understand health care improvement can create conditions for interprofessional teams to provide care and simultaneously improve care. Study III evaluates adapted clinical microsystem processes and tools successfully adapted in two different hospitals. Frontline staff reported that they needed help to balance providing care and improving care. Study IV and V explored and tested team coaching to help interprofessional teams to increase their improvement capabilities within improvement collaboratives. The participants perceived team coaching mostly positively and identified supportive coaching actions. In Study V an intervention with “The Team Coaching Model” was tested in Sweden and showed increased acquisition of improvement knowledge in the intervention teams compared to teams who did not receive the coaching model. Conclusions The thesis findings show leaders can help cultivate health care improvement capability by designing structures, processes and outcomes of their organizational systems to support health care improvement activities, setting clear improvement expectations of all staff, developing the knowledge of every staff member in the microsystem to know their operational processes and systems to promote action learning in their daily work, and providing help with team coaching using a Team Coaching Model.

Previous research showed teamwork with diversity experts¡¦ members can deal with changing rapidly and complicated external environment in which organizations face. Coach can help individual to build knowledge and skill for career development. Previous research foused on individual coach. Teamwork is quite different from individual work, so individual coach should be revised for teamwork application. This study targets at 167 R&D teams from high-tech industry in Taiwan using SEM and regression to test ¡§Team Coaching Theory¡¨ posited by Hackman & Wageman and the moderating effect of Team Reflexivity. The results show: 1. Team coaching positively influences team performance processes and then ehance team effectiveness. 2. Team reflexivity will positively moderate the relationship between team coaching and team performance processes, which means the relationship between team coaching and team performance processes will be higher in teams when team reflexivity is higher than lower. 3. Team performance processes will mediate team coaching and team effectiveness. Team coaching fosters team performance processes and then team effectiveness. Reflexivity of whole team members¡¦ also enhance the effect of team coaching on team performance processes. The results are consistent with shared leadership. Training team members manage themselves to foster R&D team effectiveness. The results of this study will discuss the implications for academy and practice application.

This thesis focuses on team processes, such as cooperation, communication, engagement and work overload in non-profit organizations. Furthermore, it monitors the transformation of these parameters into an optimal form. The transformation is observed through the sociomapping method, which is used to visualize team processes. The theoretical part of the thesis deals with teams and selected processes within them. Attention is also paid to team diagnostics, which aims to describe and comprehend team processes. Additionally, it introduces team interventions which enable better team cooperation. The following chapter focuses on the specifics of teamwork in the non-profit sphere. The empirical part presents a qualitative research, which determines how the sociomapping method realized through the means of action research affects cooperation within a team. Further, it attempts to describe how the visualization of team processes, team coaching and action plans support change in team processes and how all these three interventions influence cooperation and communication within two selected teams of one non-profit organization.

The main aim of the work is a closer examination of team cooperation issues, and evaluation team coaching efficiency as a tool of prevention or of subsequent team problems solving. Formally, the text is divided to two elemental parts. The first one is comprised of theoretical framework of team coaching. There is a principal of team functioning explained, difference from a group and possible dangers that are connected with effective team functioning. Further on, the work describes basic coaching theories, principles, structuring, procedures and a partial framework definition, where the coaching implication is desirable and where it is not. Team coaching is here introduced as not particularly specific branch of coaching, attention to it is paid mostly from a methodological point of view. Student coaching and school team coaching issues are also a part of the work, which is followed by the empirical section. The empirical part consists of a basic evaluation of the pilot project, which subject was team coaching in high schools. Such a project has not had a parallel in the Czech Republic so far. Its primary part therefore worked not only as a coaching application test on class teams, but also as verification of a tool for such a project evaluation.

(in English): This dissertation seeks to verify the impact of sociomapping-supported team coaching on team climate and performance. Sociomapping, created in the 1990s to visualize team communication, plays here a role simultaneously as the main diagnostic and intervention tool. The theoretical part focuses on the teams and psychological analysis of such team aspects as size, roles, composition and the formation and development of teamwork. Attention is further paid to team coaching and sociomapping-based intervention. One chapter analyzes the relevant team processes according to available concepts, with a subsequent analysis of team performance and climate as two teamwork outputs relevant to the study. Due to the specificity of team data analysis, the last chapter discusses teamwork analysis models. The empirical part presents a study of 103 respondents divided into and conducted on nine intervention and 12 control teams. The teams worked together on team projects for about three months. The intervention groups were supported by team coaching that involved sociomapping, while the control groups only attended meetings to discuss current work topics. The teams in both the control and intervention groups were sociomapped a total of three times, but only the intervention teams were presented with these...

No description available.