Teamwork is “work done by several associates with each doing a part but all subordinating personal prominence to the efficiency of the whole” .[1]
In a business setting accounting techniques may be used to provide financial measures of the benefits of teamwork which are useful for justifying the concept.[2]
Teamwork is increasingly advocated by health care policy makers as a means of assuring quality and safety in the delivery of services; a committee of the Institute of Medicine recommended in 2000 that patient safety programs “establish interdisciplinary team training programs for providers that incorporate proven methods of team training, such as simulation.”[3]In health care, a systematic concept analysis in 2008 concluded teamwork to be “a dynamic process involving two or more healthcare professionals with complementary backgrounds and skills, sharing common health goals and exercising concerted physical and mental effort in assessing, planning, or evaluating patient care.”[4] Elsewhere teamwork is defined as “those behaviors that facilitate effective team member interaction,” with “team” defined as “a group of two or more individuals who perform some work related task, interact with one another dynamically, have a shared past, have a foreseeable shared future, and share a common fate.”[5]
Another definition for teamwork proposed in 2008 is “the interdependent components of performance required to effectively coordinate the performance of multiple individuals”; as such, teamwork is “nested within” the broader concept of team performance which also includes individual-level task-work.[6] A 2012 review of the academic literature found that the word “teamwork” has been used “as a catchall to refer to a number of behavioral processes and emergent states.”[7]
