This article provides a sample solution for Team Work and Critical Thinking.
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Rubenfeld & Scheffer (2015) suggested that interdisciplinary teamwork and collaboration involves different communication styles and can result in conflict that can negatively affect patient care practices. Discuss how you may be able to use conflict in a positive way to promote interdisciplinary teamwork and collaboration.
Bensimon and Neumann, as cited in Rubenfeld & Scheffer (2015), identified the following eight team thinking roles:
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Solution
Team Work and Critical Thinking
Introduction
Workplace conflict is a phenomenon experienced globally in all settings where individuals work together. In healthcare settings, particularly in nursing staff, the case is no different. According to Moeta & du Rand (2019) workplace conflict continues to be a major challenge although it is not a contemporary issue with more than $359 billion being spent on resolving conflicts in the US. Additionally, the average nurse manager spends anywhere between 20% and 50% of their worktime resolving conflicts. Yet, healthcare of the 21st century continues to rely on teams from a variety of specialties like nursing, physicians, physical therapists and social workers to care for patients (Mao & Woodley, 2016).
Needless to say, this requirement for teamwork and collaboration within the healthcare setting underscores the significance of the two as lack of both leads to comprised quality and safety of care. Consequently, the purpose of this essay is to explore ways in which a nurse leader/manager can use conflict in a positive way to promote the said interdisciplinary teamwork and collaboration.
To achieve this overarching goal, the paper identifies three of Bensimon and Neumann eight team thinking roles by sharing an example from nursing practice of someone fulfilling the identified roles. While citing the two scholars Rubenfeld & Scheffer identify the eight team thinking roles as comprising of the definer, analyst, interpreter, critic, and synthesizer. To complete the list of eight, there is also the disparity monitor, the task monitor, and the emotional monitor. Only the first role –that of the definer and last two – the task monitor and the emotional monitor will be discussed in detail since the selected nurse exhibited these three predominantly.
Definition of Key Terms
In order to have concrete grasp of the three roles an operation definition of the key terms as used in this context are given. To begin with, healthcare herein refers to a multidisciplinary profession where doctors, nurses, and other health care workers from different specialties work together, effectively communicate and share the available resources with a common purposes of improving the health and meet the needs of the patient. Mayo & Woolley (2016) aver that teamwork on the other hand means a situation in which two or more individuals interact interdependently as they seek to work towards measurable goals that benefit from appropriate leadership that facilitates stability while encouraging honest and discussions that lead to problem solving. Suffice it to say that contemporary healthcare embraces interdisciplinary teamwork model to deliver services to patients. Likewise, collaboration herein describes interdisciplinary collaboration where the nursing professional has share in the process of planning, making decisions, solving problems, setting goals and working together with other members of the healthcare team. Workplace conflict refers to a state of discord emanating from actual or perceived opposition of needs, values, and interests amongst team members. It is this conflict which the paper contends that a nurse manager can utilize in positive way to enhance and reinforce interdisciplinary teamwork and collaboration.
How the Nurse Leader /Manager May Use Conflict Positively
Majority of nurse managers are appointed to their positions based on the clinical expertise they display in caring for patients and how well they relate with the rest of their members. Be that as it may, the nurse manager may be inadequately equipped to handle and manage conflict, yet this is what most of them encounter on a daily basis. One realizes there is a conflict the moment a workplace disagreement disrupts the flow of work. The conflicts may involve either the staff, patients, their families, physicians’ ancillary staff or other members of the organization and if not resolved is a leading factor in the cause of increased staff turnover, absenteeism, complaints, and diminishing commitment.
Regardless of their position, the nurse manager can turn the arising conflicts intro avenues of interdisciplinary team building and collaboration by improving trust, professional relationship, increased productivity and achievement of optimal bottom line results. The nurse leader or nurse manager can flip the conflicts into positive scenarios by understanding the conflict, managing the nurse leader’s reaction to the conflict, framing the solution within the organizational culture and lastly creating a conflict management system that is effective.
The Selected Three Roles from Benismon and Neumann’s Eight Thinking Roles of a Team
Having argued that the nurse leader can successfully turn a conflict into an avenue that promotes interdisciplinary teamwork and collaboration at their unit or department, the author of this essay considers the healthcare team as a machine system, a living biological system or a cognitive and sense making system modeled after the human mind. This conception implies that the team can perceive, know, and learn to learn if guided by a capable leader.
Guided by this rationale then, the nurse leader selected was primarily a definer, a task monitor and emotional monitor all rolled into one. The nurse manager’s definer attributes manifested in his capacity to formulate the reality to which the healthcare attends to in offering care to stroke survivors. Essentially, he distinguished himself as shared definer since he saw to it that all members of the team took part in developing the rehabilitative agenda of these patients. The next distinguishable attribute was that he was an adept task monitor as he focused on the shape of the rehabilitative team’s agenda.
This trait means that as a task monitor, he expedited and supported the healthcare team’s progress and completion for example by demonstrating that the stroke patients stood to benefit from a quick assessment and prompt initiation of rehabilitation leading to better patient outcomes. The third and last of the three roles is that this nurse manager acknowledged the fact that each individual in the team has emotions that brew and lead to a diverse intellects mix. Basically, the emotional monitor in this nurse leader/ manager was that no team member should regard collaboration in the team as fun and a way of offering psychological support to one’s colleagues instead of being a source of conflict (Buljac-Samardzic et al, 2020).
In the interdisciplinary rehabilitation team formed, it comprised of nurses, physiotherapists, physicians and other healthcare specialists. Instead of looking at the rest of the team members in condescending way due to their lack of familiarity with all opportunities found in community setting, the patient care coordinator advised them to take a broad on hospital functions where various challenges like having nurses attend weekly meetings being resolving amicably without conflicts.
Why the Nurse Leader/Manager as A Definer, Task Monitor and Emotional Monitor Role Is Necessary For the Team Thinking Process to Go Smoothly
The combined roles of the nurse manager in a stroke patients’ rehabilitative unit is significant to the other members of the IRT because contemporary clinical care continues to be more complex and specialized (Jessi Johnson, 2016). The resulting complexity and specialization requires all health care professionals to familiarize themselves with complicated healthcare services and quickly learn new methods. The increase in ageing population and the presence of other chronic diseases like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes among others in stroke patients mandates that the medical and nursing staff have to take a multidisciplinary approach where conflicts cannot be allowed to fester for long (O’Reilly et al, 2017).
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Appreciating the diversity of care needed by every patient means that for the team thinking process to progress smoothly promoting teamwork and collaboration leads to reduced medical errors, and issues that lead to nurse burnout while simultaneously increasing patient safety. That the nurse manager/ leader should inculcate interdisciplinary teamwork and interprofessional collaboration through solid communication means the other members of the IRT feel at ease with the said nurse leader’s role (Moeta & du Rand, 2019). Almost all members of the IRT agree that successful team building efforts adopted the nurse manager lead to increased staff satisfaction with their work.
Conclusion
In conclusion, this essay has established that having a hospital – based IRT that is successful and effective requires consultation right from the word go. The nursing professional should also appreciate the fact that the stroke survivors’ journey is not only unpredictable but also long and unexpected. Due to these and several other factors, the nurse unit managers or leaders should always confront the issues that lead to workplace conflict and hinder interdisciplinary teamwork and collaboration. While there exists several methods to turn conflicts into avenues of promoting teamwork and collaboration, the nurse manager’s skillful adoption of the definer, the task monitor and emotional monitor is one such method. The overriding successful denominator for resolving workplace conflicts is for the nurse leader/ manager to have continuous training on conflict management competencies.
References
Buljac-Samardzic, M., Doekhie, K. D., & van Wijngaarden, J. D. (2020). Interventions to improve team effectiveness within health care: a systematic review of the past decade. Human resources for health, 18(1), 1-42.
Jessie Johnson, R. N. (2015). Inter-professional team collaboration in stroke survivor care: A review of the literature. Perspectives, 38(2), 20.
Mao, A. T., & Woolley, A. W. (2016). Teamwork in health care: maximizing collective intelligence via inclusive collaboration and open communication. AMA journal of ethics, 18(9), 933-940.
Moeta, M. E., & du Rand, S. M. (2019). Use of scenarios to explore conflict management practices of nurse unit managers in public hospitals. Curationis, 42(1), 1-7.
O’Reilly, P., Lee, S. H., O’Sullivan, M., Cullen, W., Kennedy, C., & MacFarlane, A. (2017). Assessing the facilitators and barriers of interdisciplinary team working in primary care using normalisation process theory: an integrative review. PloS one, 12(5), e0177026.
Question
Team Work and Critical Thinking
Rubenfeld & Scheffer (2015) suggested that interdisciplinary teamwork and collaboration involves different communication styles and can result in conflict that can negatively affect patient care practices. Discuss how you may be able to use conflict in a positive way to promote interdisciplinary teamwork and collaboration.
Bensimon and Neumann, as cited in Rubenfeld & Scheffer (2015), identified the following eight team thinking roles:
- The definer (voices and creates the team’s reality)
- The analyst (assesses all of the parts of the issue)
- The interpreter (provides insight on how team members perceive outcomes)
- The critic (redefines, reanalyzes and reinterprets)
- The synthesizer (elicits all thinking perspectives and helps provide linkages for solutions)
- The disparity monitor (assesses how team members perceive outcomes)
- The task monitor (removes obstacles to team thinking and facilitates the teamwork)
- The emotional monitor (address the human, personal, and emotional aspects of team thinking during the thinking process.
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- Choose three (3) of the roles and share an example from your nursing practice of someone fulfilling the roles.
- Why is this role necessary for the team thinking process to go smoothly?
- How do other members of the team perceive this person’s role?
Please do not include names or personal identifiers in your discussion.
