Patient Safety in the Cardiac Operating Room: Human Factors and Teamwork: A Scientific Study from the American Heart Association

The cardiac surgical operating room (OR) is a complex environment in which highly trained subspecialists interact with each other using sophisticated equipment to care for patients with severe cardiac disease and significant comorbidities. Thousands of patient lives have been saved or significantly improved with the advent of modern cardiac surgery. Indeed, both mortality and morbidity for coronary artery bypass surgery have decreased during the past decade. Nonetheless, the highly skilled and dedicated personnel in cardiac ORs are human and will make errors. Refined techniques, advanced technologies, and enhanced coordination of care have led to significant improvements in cardiac surgery outcomes

Voices from the Teams - Impacts on Autonomy in Large-Scale Agile Software Development Settings

Forming autonomous, self-organizing, cross-functional teams in software development is becoming more common even in larger organizations, and many organizations are implementing the Scaled Agile Framework. When autonomous teams need to work together, they must sacrifice some level of autonomy since work needs to be coordinated with other teams, which could be a threat to team performance. This study presents how perceived autonomy has changed by listening to the voices from the teams in three large organizations. Although several respondents did not express any experienced changes to autonomy at all, others put forth important changes. The practices where several teams gather in joint events are important arenas in both positive and negative aspects. The arenas give teams a better overview and a sense of being empowered in using their veto right to stop overload of planned work. However, more detailed planning in every single team could cause less ability to switch work between teams and a sense of suffocation due to detailed routines and practices.</p

Managing team innovation in the research and development (R&D) organization : critical determinants of team effectiveness

Teams are the principal vehicle in developing new drug development strategy and executing the tasks required to accomplish those objectives. This project evaluated the key drivers for team innovation performance (defined as outcomes). Team outcomes included new information creation, compression of development time, expansion of image, learning, capability development, growth satisfaction, and overall effectiveness. The two key research questions related to how team innovation performance are assessed in the branded pharmaceutical industry, and what the drivers for optimal team performance outcomes were. Results revealed that while good correlations individually existed between team outcomes (dependent variable) and tested independent variables (autonomy, coaching, climate, proactive personality, empowering leadership, and transactive memory systems), the best predictors identified through multivariate regression analysis were leader and peer coaching and transactive memory systems. The implications of these findings are examined and specific recommendations proposed. The limitations and avenues for further research are elaborated