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Article Excerpt
In many areas of work today, tasks have reached a level of complexity that requires a wide breadth of knowledge, skills and abilities (KSA). Therefore, organizations more frequently rely on multidisciplinary teams. For example, project teams charged with automotive design are often not only staffed with engineers from research and development units and experts from the manufacturing plant, but also market researchers and purchasing managers. The adoption of multidisciplinary teams is, however, not only seen as a task-driven necessity but also used as a strategy to increase team performance. The higher the degree of multidisciplinarity, that is, the higher the number of different disciplines represented on a team, the broader the range of KSA available to the team should be. Having a more varied set of task-relevant KSAs is assumed to translate into a greater variety of perspectives, which should, in turn, increase performance in terms of quality of decision-making or innovativeness of problem-solving.
Research in the field of diversity, however, suggests that multidisciplinarity may not always benefit a team's performance. Findings in the realm of team diversity have been inconsistent with studies reporting both positive and negative effects of diversity in task-relevant KSAs (Milliken & Martins, 1996; Williams & O'Reilly, 1998; cf. the meta-analysis by Webber & Donahue, 2001). For example, top management teams' functional diversity was found to be positively related to organizational innovation (Bantel & Jackson, 1989; Wiersema & Bantel, 1992), while functional diversity of new product teams negatively affected performance (Ancona & Caldwell, 1992).
The inconsistent results suggest that the effect of multidisciplinarity may be contingent upon other variables. Scholars from the field of diversity have suggested more strongly incorporating contextual aspects into the study of the diversity-performance relationship and adopting more complex models (Williams & O'Reilly, 1998). This proposal will be applied here to the study of multidisciplinarity. We go beyond the assumption of direct effects of multidisciplinarity on outcomes to test the extent to which the effect of multidisciplinarity depends on the quality of team processes.
Innovation in health care teams
The outcome variable in this study is team innovation. Innovation is defined as '... the intentional introduction and application within a job, work team or organization of ideas, processes, products or procedures which are new to that job, work team or organization and which are designed to benefit the job, the work team or the organization' (West & Farr, 1990, p. 9). Innovations are the result of a cyclical process, consisting of stages of idea generation and stages of testing and implementing the ideas.
This study looks at innovative outcomes from teams in the health care sector. The health care field has seen a massive knowledge advancement which has resulted in diversification into highly specialized knowledge and skills areas. To make the most use of this specialization, health care providers are often organized into multidisciplinary teams to perform complex, knowledge-intensive tasks.
For some teams, such as new product development teams, their explicit task is to be innovative. But teams, whose primary task is a different one--such as treating patients--also develop innovations. They introduce innovations for a variety of reasons; for example, to better cope with a high work load, to adapt to a changed environment or to improve the effectiveness of services.
Effects of multidisciplinarity
We define multidisciplinarity here as the number of different professional groups on a team. Two streams of research inform us about the potential effect of multidisciplinarity on innovation: first, the cognitive resource perspective on teams and second, research on social identity and social categorization. According to a cognitive resource perspective, a team's cognitive resources and abilities increase with increasing levels of multidisciplinarity due to their increased breadth of KSA and the wider social networks they can draw on (cf. Williams & O'Reilly, 1998). Therefore, multidisciplinary teams should perform better on tasks that benefit from multiple perspectives than homogeneously staffed teams. Models of brainstorming also imply that group creativity could benefit from multidisciplinarity. Brainstorming groups are often used to generate creative and novel ideas, as the group setting is believed to provoke a higher level of cognitive stimulation (Paulus, 2000). Sharing of ideas in a group should stimulate novel associations which should lead to additional ideas. Taking the notion of cognitive stimulation further, the potential for mutual inspiration should increase in multidisciplinary teams. The broader the range of KSAs that individuals bring to the task, the higher the potential for cross-fertilization (Jehn, Northcraft, & Neale, 1999). In top management teams, higher dissimilarity between team members' functional backgrounds was associated with less similarity in their beliefs, indicating a wider variety of perspectives (Chattopadhyay, Glick, Miller, & Huber, 1999). Similarly, individuals from different disciplines perform different organizational roles; having a diverse set of roles in a team allows for multiple interpretations of information and wider environmental scanning. Therefore, multidisciplinarity should benefit an innovation's idea-generation stage.
Furthermore, according to the resource perspective, multidisciplinarity should be also beneficial for the implementation phase of an innovation. First, multidisciplinarity makes available a wider breadth of KSAs relevant for implementation; second, teams with members of multiple professions are more likely to have a wider social network to access resources that can help with implementation (Keller, 2001).
Theories on social identity and self-categorization (Tajfel, 1982; Turner, 1987), however, suggest that teams could be ineffective at capitalizing on the potential benefits of their multidisciplinarity. These theories hold that human beings have a tendency to simplify and to make sense of the world by sorting each other into social categories that are relevant to their identity. Appearance, age, gender or interests are just a few examples of potential categories. To secure a positive self-image and to enhance self-esteem, people develop positive views and judgments about their own...
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