Teams as Complex Adaptive Systems: Reviewing 17 Years of Research

At the turn of the century Arrow, McGrath, and Berdahl (2000) portrayed teams as complex adaptive systems (CAS). And yet, despite broad agreement that this approach facilitates a better understanding of teams, it has only now been timidly incorporated into team research. To help fully incorporate the logic of teams as CAS in the science of teams, we review extant research on teams' approached from a nonlinear dynamical system theory. Using a systematic review approach, we selected 92 articles published over the last 17 years, in order to integrate what we know about teams as CAS. Our review reveals the evidence supporting teams as CAS, and the set of analytical techniques to analyze team data from this perspective. Our work contributes to teams' theory and practice by offering ways to identify both research methods and managing techniques that scholars and practitioners may apply to study and manage teams as CAS

An Evaluation of Clustering Algorithms for Modeling Game-Based Assessment Work Processes

Game-based assessments (GBAs) use game design elements to make assessments more engaging for students and capture response data about work processes. GBA response data are often too complex to plan for every potential response pattern, so some researchers have turned to exploratory cluster analysis to classify students’ work processes. This paper identifies the design elements specific to GBAs and investigates how well k-means, self-organizing maps (SOM), and robust clustering using links (ROCK) clustering algorithms group response patterns in prototypical GBA response data. Results from a simulation study are discussed, and a tutorial is provided with recommendations of general considerations and best practices for analyzing GBA data with clustering algorithms

Resilience and Adaptive Capacity in Hospital Teams

Introduction Resilient Healthcare, a field derived from Resilience Engineering, provides a set of theoretical principles for understanding quality and safety in complex systems. So far, these principles have been used to capture individual, departmental, and organisational proactive responses to variable conditions and how this flexibility, involving anticipating, monitoring, responding, learning, and coordinating, contributes to safety. Empirical exploration of Resilient Healthcare has primarily taken place in specific healthcare settings such as emergency departments and surgery, with specific activities such as flow procedures, anaesthesia, blood transfusion, nurse handover, electronic charting, and patient discharge. Understanding healthcare work beyond these limited settings and activities is important, as most patient encounters in the hospital occur in ward settings beyond surgery and emergency care. The role of the team in flexible adaptation also needs to be explored, as effective teamwork is widely recognised as a contributor to healthcare safety.Healthcare teams are diverse and their need for adaptive capacity, the challenges they face, and their ability to coordinate are also likely to be different. Current research on healthcare teams involves teams that are easily defined, such as resuscitation teams, surgical teams, or teams in a simulation lab. Thus, the full range of healthcare teams and their capacity to adapt has not yet been captured. To better understand how to improve teamwork and safety, we must first understand how teams are already adapting to variable conditions in complex organisations. This includes aspects such as the clinical and organisational challenges they face, the dynamics of the team, how flexible teamworking can be supported, as well as more broadly understanding and categorising the different types of teams that exist in healthcare. Aims and objectives The aim of this PhD was to investigate how adaptive capacity is hindered or supported by organisational and contextual factors in different types of hospital teams.The study objectives were to: 1. Review the concept of adaptive teamwork, synthesising available cross-disciplinary research, clarifying key definitions, and identifying factors that might impact team adaptive capacity 2. Develop an empirically derived typology for classifying types of hospital teams based on their structure, membership, and function3. Identify the misalignments, adaptions, pressures, and trade-off decisions of hospital teams in practice 4. Understand differences between types of hospital teams, both in the misalignments and pressures they experience and in the adaptations and trade-off decisions they make, using mixed qualitative methods in two hospitals in England Methods The study was conducted in three phases: - Phase 1: A scoping review of adaptive teamwork Phase one involved a scoping literature review to systematically map existing research on adaptive teamwork and to identify gaps in knowledge. The primary research question was: What do we know about the structure and function of adaptive teams in practice? - Phase 2: Theory development Phase two involved analysis of data previously collected by the larger research team to better understand work-as-done and team structure in hospital teams. The data included 88.5 hours of hospital ethnography on five different hospital wards. An inductive-deductive approach to data analysis was undertaken. - Phase 3: A case study of adaptive teamwork in England Phase three consisted of data collection in two hospitals situated within one Trust (one large and one community hospital), with five teams per hospital (two total teams of each type). In total, 144 hours and 54 minutes of ethnography were completed across the two hospitals and 24 semi-structured interviews were conducted. The overarching aim of the case study was to investigate how adaptive capacity is hindered or supported by organisational and contextual factors in different types of teams. This phase was conducted in a directed rather than exploratory way, building on the data from phase two and increasing the depth of understanding of all five team types. In this phase, both interview and observational data were analysed using the typology and two frameworks produced in phase two. The England case study will eventually contribute to a comparative, cross-country analysis to synthesise and compare findings between countries and healthcare systems (Anderson, Aase, et al., 2020). Ethics and dissemination The overall Resilience in Healthcare research programme that this study is part of has been granted ethical approval by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (Ref.No. 8643334). Ethical approval to conduct the study in England was granted through King’s College London Research Ethics Office (LRS/DP-21/22-26055). HRA REC approval was 10also granted (22/HRA/1621; IRAS 312079). A research passport was obtained, and letter of access received from local Trust R&D.Results The phase one scoping review included 204 documents and mapped their geographies, fields, settings, and designs. Terminology used to describe elements of the adaptive process were compared. A new conceptualisation of the team adaptive cycle was proposed, along with a new definition for team adaptive capacity. Future opportunities for research were proposed, including the opportunity to study adaptive teams in situ and to consider differences in team adaptive capacity based on unique team features. The second phase of the study resulted in the conceptualisation of: a typology of healthcare teams (paper under review), the Concepts for Applying Resilience Engineering Model 2.0 (published paper), and the Pressures Diagram (published paper). Building on this, the third phase suggested that teams’ adaptive strategies varied based on team type, although demand-capacity misalignments occurred across all team types, suggesting that team type impacts adaptive capacity. While adaptations supported teams’ abilities to overcome misalignments, they also required resources and were more or less possible depending on team type. Likewise, while pressures occurred across all team types, trade-off decisions varied depending on the team type. These findings have implications for team training, workforce planning, and resourcing, and can inform future work that aims to strengthen adaptive capacity and teamworking.Conclusions Overall, this thesis makes unique and important contributions to the literature on both resilient healthcare and adaptive teamwork. It has developed multiple new practical and theoretical models and typologies that have subsequently been used internationally in research. A novel approach combining teamwork and resilient healthcare theory was used successfully to understand and compare healthcare misalignments, adaptations, pressures, and trade-offs in five different team types. The finding that adaptive strategies and trade-off decisions differ based on team type challenges existing teamwork improvement practices, which take a one-size-fits-all approach to conceptualising and training teams. The results provide foundational knowledge to guide future intervention design, which may potentially bring about wider changes in training and sustaining successful teams and supporting their adaptive capacity

A Consumer Neuroscience Study of Information Processing of Brand Advertisements and the Store Environment in Compulsive Buying

Background. Compulsive buying—defined as excessive, uncontrolled, and repetitive buying— is a serious problem in today’s society, driven by consumeristic values and reinforced by marketing efforts. However, the research on the external influences (e.g., brand information) and underlying processes that explain consumer behavior in brand-manifesting situations in compulsive buying is relatively scarce. This thesis provides an integrative literature review and two experimental studies that yield cross-disciplinary insights into the compulsive buying phenomenon. The thesis aims to study the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses that characterize consumer-brand interactions at relevant brand touchpoints in compulsive buying. Research methodology. Two experimental studies investigate similarities and differences between two groups of consumers with high and low compulsive buying tendencies (CBTs) at two brand touchpoints that represent a pre-purchase and purchase phase of the consumer journey. Multimodal consumer neuroscience tools (i.e., eye-tracker, EEG, and EDA) are employed to collect neurophysiological and physiological responses during exposure to marketing information. The first study examines consumer information processing of advertisements during a simulated TV commercial-viewing experiment. The second study investigates consumer information processing of store environments during a field experiment conducted in two single-brand fashion-apparel stores (i.e., low-end vs. high-end). Findings. The findings from the first study indicate that, regardless of their CBT level, consumers tend to allocate a relatively equal amount of cognitive resources to attend to, process, and remember exposed advertising information during the entire duration of commercial viewing. The two groups differed in their visual processing of brand elements only when viewing advertisements related to social cause. In the consumer group with a high CBT, a higher cognitive workload was linked to a lower probability of subsequent brand recognition. The findings from the second study revealed that, regardless of the fashion-store type, consumers with a high CBT chose items that were more expensive than consumers with a low CBT. The changes in physiological arousal during the first minute of shopping showed that, although both consumer groups were more emotionally responsive to the high-end than the low-end fashion store, the emotional receptivity in both groups was expressed in different physiological responses. Specifically, consumers with a high CBT demonstrated a higher frequency and a shorter duration of emotional responses, whereas consumers with a low CBT showed a higher amplitude of emotional responses in the high-end fashion store than in the low-end fashion store. The results indicate that there are two potentially different mechanisms that occur in the two consumer groups during encounters with store information. Conclusions. This thesis provides theoretical, methodological, managerial, and societal contributions. This research highlights the fact that compulsive buying is a complex phenomenon and that researchers should address both internal and external influences, examine the unconscious processes and mechanisms, and study consumer responses to marketing information in more naturalistic settings. The thesis also promotes the integration of consumer neuroscience tools with the compulsive buying research practice, aims to increase the awareness of the problem of compulsive buying, and encourages the development of novel, technologybased and scientifically driven consumer-behavior-monitoring policies