Relational Variables Impacting the Healthcare Team
Abstract
The movement in the healthcare system towards interprofessional collaborative teamwork values the perspectives of various healthcare professionals. Although this system shift has been essential to quality improvement, there have been indications of issues occurring between professionals that include conflict and impaired team performance. Although the current literature on interprofessional collaboration acknowledges the competencies and demonstrated behaviours that indicate successful and difficult collaborative efforts there is a lack of research investigating the relational variables that occur between healthcare professionals.
The purpose of this research was to test a theoretically derived model of healthcare professionals’ relational variables. These variables related to warmth, competence and agreeableness associated with respect and the shame strategies of attack self, attack other, withdrawal, avoidance and adapt to see if these variables moderated or mediated health professionals’ socialization in the healthcare team. This study used an online questionnaire to capture responses to the survey from 315 healthcare professionals consisting of Registered Nurses, Registered Practical Nurses and Physicians.
The conceptual model was supported by data associated with several proposed hypotheses. In this study, hypotheses for research question 1 confirmed that health professionals who displayed warmth were more likely to receive a high level of respect, while those who displayed high degrees of competence were more likely to receive high levels of agreeableness from team members. When high degrees of warmth were exhibited health professionals were more likely to receive high levels of competence from team members.
Three mediation relationships associated with research question 2 were confirmed indicating the shame responses of attack self and attack other accounted for some of the relationship between low respect and poor socialization through partial mediation. The shame response of withdrawal, accounted for full mediation of the relationship between low respect and poor socialization.
Two global questions asked whether healthcare professionals felt comfortable and included in the team. It was found that Physicians felt more comfortable and included while Registered Nurses and Registered Practical Nurses differed, feeling much less comfortable and less included as part of their teams.