Papers by Amy C. Edmondson
s (Alphabetical order) ............................................................................. more s (Alphabetical order) ................................................................................................................. 6 IWOT22 List of participants ................................................................................................................... 33 Local organizing committee .................................................................................................................. 34 International organizing committee ....................................................................................................... 34 Associated scientific journal .................................................................................................................. 34 About Leiden ......................................................................................................................................... 35
BMJ quality & safety, Jan 17, 2018
In 2009, the National Patient Safety Foundation's Lucian Leape Institute (LLI) published a pa... more In 2009, the National Patient Safety Foundation's Lucian Leape Institute (LLI) published a paper identifying five areas of healthcare that require system-level attention and action to advance patient safety.The authors argued that to truly transform the safety of healthcare, there was a need to address medical education reform; care integration; restoring joy and meaning in work and ensuring the safety of the healthcare workforce; consumer engagement in healthcare and transparency across the continuum of care. In the ensuing years, the LLI convened a series of expert roundtables to address each concept, look at obstacles to implementation, assess potential for improvement, identify potential implementation partners and issue recommendations for action. Reports of these activities were published between 2010 and 2015. While all five areas have seen encouraging developments, multiple challenges remain. In this paper, the current members of the LLI (now based at the Institute for H...
Human Resource Management Review, 2017
Cross-boundary teaming, within and across organizations, is an increasingly popular strategy for ... more Cross-boundary teaming, within and across organizations, is an increasingly popular strategy for innovation. Knowledge diversity is seen to expand the range of views and ideas that teams can draw upon to innovate. Yet, case studies of practice reveal that teaming across knowledge boundaries can be difficult, and innovation is not always realized. Two streams of research are particularly relevant for understanding this challenge: research on team effectiveness and research on knowledge in organizations. They offer complementary insights: the former stream focuses on group dynamics and measures team inputs, processes, emergent states, and outcomes, while the latter closely investigates dialogue and objects in recurrent social practices. Drawing from both streams, this paper seeks to shed light on the complexity of cross-boundary teaming, while highlighting factors that may enhance its effectiveness. We develop an integrative model to provide greater explanatory power than previous approaches to assess crossboundary teaming efforts and their innovation performance.
Small Group Research, 2014
This article proposes that team reflexivity—a deliberate process of discussing team goals, proces... more This article proposes that team reflexivity—a deliberate process of discussing team goals, processes, or outcomes—can function as an antidote to team-level biases and errors in decision making. We build on prior work conceptualizing teams as information-processing systems and highlight reflexivity as a critical information-processing activity. Prior research has identified consequential information-processing failures that occur in small groups, such as the failure to discuss privately held relevant information, biased processing of information, and failure to update conclusions when situations change. We propose that team reflexivity reduces the occurrence of information-processing failures by ensuring that teams discuss and assess the implications of team information for team goals, processes, and outcomes. In this article, we present a model of team information-processing failures and remedies involving team reflexivity, and we discuss the conditions under which team reflexivity ...
International Handbook of Organizational Teamwork and Cooperative Working, 2008
This social psychological analysis explores themes of trust and collective learning in teams. I d... more This social psychological analysis explores themes of trust and collective learning in teams. I describe interpersonal risks that can inhibit collective learning, distinguish psychological safety from trust, and explain why psychological safety mitigates interpersonal risks and facilitates a structured learning process in teams. Examples from field studies in several organizational settings are used to support a new theoretical model and show how leaders can help their teams manage the risks of learning. when interacting with others and facing change, uncertainty, or ambiguity. To take action in such situations involves learning behavior, including asking questions, seeking help, experimenting with unproven actions, or seeking feedback. Although these activities are associated with such desired outcomes as innovation and performance, (e.g., Edmondson 1999; West 2000), engaging in them carries a risk for the individual of being seen as ignorant, incompetent, or perhaps just disruptive. Most people feel a need to manage this risk to minimize harm to their image, especially in the workplace and especially in the presence of those who formally evaluate them. This is both instrumental (promotions and other valued rewards may be dependent on impressions held by bosses and others) and socio-emotional (we prefer others' approval than disapproval). One solution to minimizing risk to one's image is simply to avoid engaging in interpersonal behaviors for which outcomes are uncertain. The problem with this solution is that it precludes learning. Another solution-to create conditions in which perceived interpersonal risk is reasonably low-is explored in this paper. Most people in organizations are being evaluated-whether frequently or infrequently, overtly or implicitly-in an ongoing way. The presence of others with more power or status makes the threat of evaluation especially salient, but it by no means disappears in the presence of peers and subordinates. This salience of evaluation in organizations intensifies the problem of image risk that people also confront in every day lives (Snyder 1974; de Cremer, Snyder et al. 2001; Turnley and Bolino 2001). Here I posit four specific risks to image that people face at work: being seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive. Each is triggered by particular behaviors through which individuals and groups learn. First, when individuals ask questions or seek information, they run the risk of being seen as ignorant. Most of us can think of a time when we hesitated to ask a question because it
Harvard business review, 2008
An organization with a strong learning culture faces the unpredictable deftly. However, a concret... more An organization with a strong learning culture faces the unpredictable deftly. However, a concrete method for understanding precisely how an institution learns and for identifying specific steps to help it learn better has remained elusive. A new survey instrument from professors Garvin and Edmondson of Harvard Business School and assistant professor Gino of Carnegie Mellon University allows you to ground your efforts in becoming a learning organization. The tool's conceptual foundation is what the authors call the three building blocks of a learning organization. The first, a supportive learning environment, comprises psychological safety, appreciation of differences, openness to new ideas, and time for reflection. The second, concrete learning processes and practices, includes experimentation, information collection and analysis, and education and training. These two complementary elements are fortified by the final building block: leadership that reinforces learning. The surv...
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2012
This paper shows how meso-level structures support effective coordination in temporary groups. Pr... more This paper shows how meso-level structures support effective coordination in temporary groups. Prior research on coordination in temporary groups describes how roles encode individual responsibilities so that coordination between relative strangers is possible. We extend this research by introducing key tenets from team effectiveness research to theorize when role-based coordination might be more or less effective. We develop these ideas in a multi-method study of a hospital emergency department (ED) redesign. Before the redesign, people coordinated in ad-hoc groupings, which provided flexibility because any nurse could work with any doctor, but these groupings were limited in effectiveness because people were not accountable to each other for progress, did not have shared understanding of their work, and faced interpersonal risks when reaching out to other roles. The redesign introduced new meso-level structures that bounded a set of roles (rather than a set of specific individuals, as in a team) and gave them collective responsibility for a whole task. We conceptualized the meso-level structures as team scaffolds and found that they embodied the logic of both role and team structures. The team scaffolds enabled small group interactions to take the form of an actual team process with team-level prioritizing, updating, and helping, based on new-found accountability, overlapping representations of work, and belongingdespite the lack of stable team composition. Quantitative data revealed changes to the coordination patterns in the ED (captured through a two-mode network) after the team scaffolds were implemented and showed a forty percent improvement in patient throughput time.
Organization Science, 2015
This paper shows how mesolevel structures support effective coordination in temporary groups. Pri... more This paper shows how mesolevel structures support effective coordination in temporary groups. Prior research on coordination in temporary groups describes how roles encode individual responsibilities so that coordination between relative strangers is possible. We extend this research by introducing key tenets from team effectiveness research to theorize when role-based coordination might be more or less effective. We develop these ideas in a multimethod study of a hospital emergency department (ED) redesign. Before the redesign, people coordinated in ad hoc groupings, which provided flexibility because any nurse could work with any doctor, but these groupings were limited in effectiveness because people were not accountable to each other for progress, did not have shared understanding of their work, and faced interpersonal risks when reaching out to other roles. The redesign introduced new mesolevel structures that bounded a set of roles (rather than a set of specific individuals, a...
ew readers would disagree with the suggestion that those who develop and exercise a greater capac... more ew readers would disagree with the suggestion that those who develop and exercise a greater capacity to learn are likely to outperform those less engaged in learning. Indeed, we might make the same unsurprising prediction about individuals, teams, or organizations. Nonetheless, the relationship between learning and performance is not as straightforward as it first appears. Why is this relationship problematic? First, although learning is clearly essential for sustained individual and organizational performance in a changing environment, at times the costs may be more visible than performance benefits. Learning can be messy, uncertain, interpersonally risky, and without guaranteed results. Moreover, not all learning leads to improved performance; it depends on what is being learned and how important it is for particular dimensions of performance. Although some learning is straightforward (the knowledge is codified and readily used by newcomers), other forms rely on experimentation and exploration for which outcomes are unknown in advance. Lastly, time delays between learning and performance may obscure or even undermine evidence of a clear causal relationship. As described in this article, organizations can at least partly address these challenges through leadership that creates a climate of psychological safety and that promotes inquiry. But first, let's go into more detail about some of the ways in which a focus on learning can actually appear to undermine performance. Impediments to Learning Where catastrophic failure is possible, mistakes are inevitable, or innovation is necessary, learning from failure is highly desirable.Yet research suggests that few organizations dig deeply enough to understand and capture the potential learning from failures.Why this resistance to learning? Psychological and Organizational Barriers. A multitude of barriers can 2 F TEAM TIP Use the information in this article to identify and overcome the barriers to learning in your group and organization.
inferences (e.g., while a person's sex may predict salary level, it would be nonsensical to asser... more inferences (e.g., while a person's sex may predict salary level, it would be nonsensical to assert the reverse). Examples 9 in Table MN-A may help clarify the category.
Learning and Performance Matter, 2008
This chapter explores complexities of the relationship between learning and performance. We start... more This chapter explores complexities of the relationship between learning and performance. We start with the general proposition that learning promotes performance, and then describe several challenges for researchers and managers who wish to study or promote learning in support of performance improvement. We also review psychological and interpersonal risks of learning behavior, suggest conditions under which exploratory learning and experimentation is most critical, and describe conditions and leader behaviors conducive to supporting this kind of learning in organizations. We illustrate our ideas with examples from field studies across numerous industry contexts, and conclude with a discussion of implications of this complex relationship for performance management.
JAMA surgery, Jan 28, 2014
IMPORTANCE Physicians can demonstrate mastery of the knowledge that supports continued clinical c... more IMPORTANCE Physicians can demonstrate mastery of the knowledge that supports continued clinical competence by passing a maintenance of certification examination (MOCEX). Performance depends on professional learning and development, which may be enhanced by informal routine interactions with colleagues. Some physicians, such as those in solo practice, may have less opportunity for peer interaction, thus negatively influencing their examination performance. OBJECTIVE To determine the relationship among level of peer interaction, group and solo practice, and MOCEX performance. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Longitudinal cohort study of 568 surgeons taking the 2008 MOCEX. Survey responses reporting the level of physicians' peer interactions and their practice type were related to MOCEX scores, controlling for initial qualifying examination scores, practice type, and personal characteristics. EXPOSURES Solo practice and amount of peer interaction. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES Scores...
The Leadership Quarterly, 2003
Leadership research relating top management team demographics to firm performance has produced mi... more Leadership research relating top management team demographics to firm performance has produced mixed empirical results. This paper suggests a new explanation for these inconsistencies. We first note that a given top management team (TMT) is likely to face a variety of different situations over time. Thus, while TMT demographic composition is relatively stable, the TMT task is dynamic and variable. In some situations, team members have similar information and interests (a symmetric distribution); in others, information or interests diverge (an asymmetric distribution). Based on team effectiveness theory, we then argue that, unless group process is managed accordingly, asymmetric distributions of situation-specific information and interests will reduce TMT decision-making effectiveness. We develop leader process choices to mitigate the potentially harmful effect of these asymmetries. These arguments form the basis of a theoretical model of TMT effectiveness that integrates insights from research on leadership, group decision-making, team effectiveness, and negotiation, and has practical implications for how leaders of senior teams can improve team effectiveness through appropriate process choices. LEADING TOP MANAGEMENT TEAMS 1 Encouraging the CEO and senior executives to work as a team has been suggested as a way of enhancing strategic leadership effectiveness in complex organizations. Through strategic leadership (Boal & Hooijberg, 2000), an organization maneuvers forward into an imperfectly known future, making commitments to some opportunities while turning away from others. Many practitioners and scholars have argued that teamwork at the top promotes the generation of creative ideas and multiple alternatives, enables executives to utilize diverse experience to solve difficult problems, and increases involvement and commitment of key senior executives (Ancona & Nadler, 1989; Bauman, Jackson, & Lawrence, 1997; Nadler, 1996). A top management team (TMT) provides a way to cope with the turbulence and complexity in the external environment that has complicated the task of executive leadership (Hambrick, 1998; Janofsky, 1993; Nadler, 1998). Teamwork allows the CEO to engage in a participative group process through which diverse members wrestle together with difficult issues to make decisions and build commitment to implementing them, giving rise to strategic leadership effectiveness. At the same time, considerable research and anecdotal evidence suggest that TMTs often fail to achieve their potential. Scholars have found that many senior groups fail to engage in real teamwork (Hackman, 1990; Hambrick, 1994; Katzenbach, 1998). Others have reported that TMTs can find it difficult to resolve conflict (Amason, 1996), build commitment (Wooldridge and Floyd, 1990), or reach closure in a timely fashion (Eisenhardt, 1989; Harrison, 1996; Hickson, et al., 1986). Several in-depth case studies document how dysfunctional group dynamics can lead to errors in judgment and flawed decisions. Notably, Janis' (1982) early work on groupthink attributed certain foreign policy fiascoes to the pressures for conformity that arise within cohesive senior groups, and Ross and Staw (1986; 1993) conducted case studies examining how groups of senior executives escalate commitment to failing courses of action. These leadership failures can be explained by an inability to manage team process effectively. LEADING TOP MANAGEMENT TEAMS 2 Team researchers use the term "process losses" (Steiner, 1972) to describe situations in which groups fail to perform well, despite having sufficient resources, diversity of experience, or other advantages that should facilitate achieving team goals. Well-documented process losses include pressures for conformity that lead to premature convergence on a solution (Janis, 1982; Taras, 1991), the failure to disclose all relevant information that group members possess (Stasser, 1999), and a series of other coordination and motivation problems. Although these process losses in TMTs are likely to reduce decision quality and overall team effectiveness, the question of what factors might enable senior teams to be less vulnerable to them has not been addressed in the research literature. This article develops implications of research on group interaction processes for TMT effectiveness. Instead of using relatively stable team characteristics such as demographic composition to explain differences in TMT effectiveness, we focus on the dynamic relationship between the team and the different situations it faces over time. We propose that the same team composition will have a different effect on team effectiveness depending on situation-specific distributions of information and interests. Team effectiveness includes three dimensions (Hackman, 1987): (1) the degree to which a team's decisions enhance organizational performance (e.g, Hambrick, 1994), (2) members' commitment to implementing team decisions and willingness to work together in the future (Amason, 1996; Nadler, 1996; Schweiger, Sandberg, & Ragan, 1986), and (3) the extent to which team process meets members' growth and satisfaction needs (Hackman, 1987; Hambrick, 1994). Situation-specific distributions refer to the distinctive information or interests held by different team members in a specific situation. Unless group decision-making processes are managed accordingly, asymmetrical distributions of situation-specific information or interests may reduce team effectiveness. We therefore develop a set of process choices through which leaders can mitigate these potentially harmful effects, producing greater alignment between situational factors and group processes.
Strategic Organization, 2012
In this study, we examine a complex pathway through which CEOs, who exhibit relational leadership... more In this study, we examine a complex pathway through which CEOs, who exhibit relational leadership, may improve the quality of strategic decisions of their top management teams (TMTs) by creating psychological conditions of trust and facilitating learning from failures in their teams. Structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses of survey data collected from 77 TMTs indicate that (1) the relationship between CEO relational leadership and team learning from failures was mediated by trust between TMT members; (2) team learning from failures mediated the relationship between team trust and strategic decision quality. Supplemented by qualitative data from two TMTs, these findings suggest that CEOs can improve the quality of strategic decisions their TMTs make by shaping a relational context of trust and facilitating learning from failures.
Organization Science, 2012
Please scroll down for article-it is on subsequent pages With 12,500 members from nearly 90 count... more Please scroll down for article-it is on subsequent pages With 12,500 members from nearly 90 countries, INFORMS is the largest international association of operations research (O.R.) and analytics professionals and students. INFORMS provides unique networking and learning opportunities for individual professionals, and organizations of all types and sizes, to better understand and use O.R. and analytics tools and methods to transform strategic visions and achieve better outcomes. For more information on INFORMS, its publications, membership, or meetings visit http://www.informs.org
Management Science, 2007
This paper contributes to research on organizational learning by investigating specific learning ... more This paper contributes to research on organizational learning by investigating specific learning activities undertaken by improvement project teams in hospital intensive care units and proposing an integrative model to explain implementation success. Organizational learning is important in this context because medical knowledge changes constantly and hospital care units must learn new practices if they are to provide high-quality care. To develop a model of factors affecting improvement project teams driving essential organizational learning in health care, we draw from three streams of related research—best-practice transfer (BPT), team learning (TL), and process change (PC). To test the model’s hypotheses, we collected data from 23 neonatal intensive care units seeking to implement new or improved practices. We first analyzed the frequency of specific learning activities reported by improvement project participants and discovered two distinct factors: learn-what (activities that i...
Journal of Organizational Behavior, 2006
This paper introduces the construct of leader inclusiveness-words and deeds exhibited by leaders ... more This paper introduces the construct of leader inclusiveness-words and deeds exhibited by leaders that invite and appreciate others' contributions. We propose that leader inclusiveness helps cross-disciplinary teams overcome the inhibiting effects of status differences, allowing members to collaborate in process improvement. The existence of a professional hierarchy in medicine and the differential status accorded to those in different disciplines is well established in the health care literature, as is the need for quality improvement. We build on this foundation to suggest that profession-derived status is positively associated with psychological safety (H1)-a key antecedent of speaking up and learning behavior-in health care teams. We hypothesize that this effect varies across teams (H2), and furthermore, that leader inclusiveness predicts psychological safety (H3) and moderates the relationship between status and psychological safety (H4). Finally, we suggest psychological safety predicts engagement in quality improvement work (H5) and mediates the relationship between leader inclusiveness and engagement (H6). Survey data collected in 23 neonatal intensive care units involved in quality improvement projects support our hypotheses. These results provide insight into antecedents of and strategies for fostering improvement efforts in health care and other sectors in which cross-disciplinary teams engage in collaborative learning to improve products or services.
Journal of Interprofessional Care, 2012
What is the role of healthcare culture in interprofessional practice? What of power, and hierarch... more What is the role of healthcare culture in interprofessional practice? What of power, and hierarchy? This book is a collection of papers that address the sociological considerations affecting the context and outcomes of interprofessional initiatives, a perspective not much explored in the interprofessional literature. For a change, this book focuses more on theoretical aspects of interprofessionalism, rather than descriptions of site-specific activities. Sociological questions addressing the very underpinnings of clinical practice are examined, such as why individuals work in teams, how team members relate to each other and the variables affecting howdifferent groups perceive each other. These basic questions of human interaction have profound effects on the efficacy of interprofessional initiatives, and deserve to be explored at some depth. Readers involved in implementing interprofessional teams or providing interprofessional education (IPE) will find this most useful; used in these contexts, the papers in this book provide helpful alternative perspectives to consider common issues arising in the design and implementation of interprofessional programs. For instance, Chesters and Burley present a paper that rightly describes achieving interprofessional practice as a ‘wicked’ problem: one which is difficult to define, and often requires a number of complicated and partial solutions. Boyce, Borthwick, Moran and Nancarrow’s overview of the different strategies of professional protectionism provides a compelling argument that discourse about interprofessionalism without talking of hierarchy is impossible. The book has a goal of providing practical solutions, and d’Avray and McCrorie’s paper does this by providing some suggestions for overcoming several types of barriers to IPE. The editors do describe assembling an ‘eclectic’ group of authors, with the result that some papers are less useful in understanding the culture of interprofessional practice, or lack actionable suggestions. The book is intentionally light in including papers that describe institution-specific interprofessional activities, but where it does so, the activities seem well thought out and successful. In the context of the theoretical perspectives presented by the other papers, one reads the activities with theoretical considerations in mind: for instance, Moran, Boyce and Nissen’s description of a competitive student IPE activity (‘Health Care Team Challenge’) is more meaningful when keeping in mind Carpenter and Dickinson’s suggestions for improving interactions between students of different professions. When approaching a topic with a lens as broad as sociology, there are the risks of becoming overly general and waxing philosophical, which this book for the most part avoids. Yet, a dash of it is necessary to confront the questions that hover on the sidelines of descriptions of site-specific interprofessional activities. Why do some work better than others? How do team members, of the same and different professions, view each other as individuals? This book provides and suggests many different questions to ask about the effects of sociological considerations on interprofessional practice, and even attempts to provide some suggestions based on these observations. Yet, the many questions raised suggests that the sociology of healthcare teams needs to be mapped out in further detail to continue to purposefully design interprofessional activities.
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Papers by Amy C. Edmondson