Communicative patterns in organizational (healthcare) teams

As team processes are often consigned to a ‘black box’, this dissertation contributes to unpacking team-level communicative processes as drivers for organizational team functioning. Both conceptually and empirically, we aimed to untangle how communicative processes unfold during collaboration periods in organizational teams. In the first part of this dissertation, we contributed to a more process-oriented understanding of team-based collective intelligence. In addition, we developed a comprehensive framework to study communicative patterns from various aspects (i.e., content, structure, and temporality) and showed how patterned communication may relate to team and organizational-level outcomes. In our own empirical work, we found fine-grained evidence for more back-and-forth communicative patterns underlying the decision-making process in multidisciplinary healthcare team meetings, which seems to be rooted in insufficient orientation of the patients’ background problems. In addition, we observed that team members respond with emotionally laden communication after naturally occurring workflow interruptions, together with more conversational clarification. In sum, both scholars and practitioners benefit from understanding patterned communication because these insights offer sound foundations to reflect on improvements regarding organizational team functioning.