Blog 3, ‘Like Fine Wine’, Group 9

Dear Hospital Admins,

From our understanding, your new cardiac units in their MICS training fulfill a variety of traditional duties as a group. Under this presumption, we would like to offer some advice to build and strengthen group performance based on psychological research. To help memorize the advice, we’ve shortened three of our best tips into memorable phrases.

The first phrase lightly regards leadership. To preface, a group typically does better with an agreed-upon leader to head tasks, assist in assigning roles, and most importantly, influence group members’ ability to speak up (Edmonson, 1996). From the last point, we can gather that overpowering often obsoletes others’ opinions (Edmonson, 2003). In other words, the leader (who has the most power) should not give their opinion first. It can easily influence others to not give their opinion because of groupthink (Packer, 2009).

Following the concept of leaders and teamwork, we suggest working on balancing expertise and collaboration. Group collaboration to provide information will empower each member’s expertise about a topic, as well as improve planning, which positively impacts group performance if done correctly (Woolley et al, 2008). For this, we offer the advice collaboration and flow are the way to go, interpreted as, “for the best results, collaborate and trust the efforts and information from others.”

As a final piece of advice, we would like to make aware the four types of communication failure: Audience, Purpose, Occasion, and Content failures (Lingard, 2004). These failures can be apocalyptic for group performance if they are present in team tasks. Henceforth, they can be referred to as APOC Communication Failures. To avoid these failures, we encourage implementing team interventions from Sunstein & Hastie (2014), and Wittenbaum & Park (2001).

We hope these phrases help positively impact your cardiac unit’s group performance!

Sincerely,

“Like Fine Wine” Group 9