Healthcare organizations face an impending shortage of over one million nurses. Staff turnover adds costs to healthcare and decreases the morale of the unit. Teamwork has been shown to be related to engagement as engagement has been shown to be related to retention. Understanding how teamwork mitigates increasing workload at the unit level is critical to reducing turnover at the nursing unit level. This research explored relationships between teamwork and productivity and teamwork and retention rates for nurses. The Neuman Systems Model was used as the framework to guide this retrospective correlational analysis with teamwork as a flexible line of defense protecting nurse retention against the stress of increasing workload. Results indicates that teamwork was a relating factor but did not significantly correlate to productivity or retention rates directly. Of important note, units with lower productivity tended to have a stronger association with teamwork and retention rates
