The importance of a high-performance work environment in hospitals.

Objective: To examine the benefits of a high-performance work environment (HPWE) for employees, patients, and hospitals.

Study Setting: Forty-five adult, medical-surgical units in nine hospitals in upstate New York.

Study Design: Cross-sectional study.

Building collaborative capacity: promoting interdisciplinary teamwork in the absence of formal teams.

Background: Contradictory findings about the effectiveness of health care teams may relate to the actual structure of teams-loose rather than formal-and the nature of decision making-hierarchical rather than egalitarian. We introduce the concept of collaborative capacity-the likelihood that providers, no matter how brief their exchange, will collaborate as if they were members of an egalitarian team even in the absence of a formal team structure.

Objective: To examine aspects and determinants of collaborative capacity, namely task interdependence, norms of working together, and egalitarian collaboration among interdisciplinary providers on health care units.