Social interaction in management group meetings: a case study of Finnish hospital

Network approaches and interventions in healthcare settings: A systematic scoping review

INTRODUCTION

The growing interest in networks of interactions is sustained by the conviction that they can be leveraged to improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare delivery systems. Evidence in support of this conviction, however, is mostly based on descriptive studies. Systematic evaluation of the outcomes of network interventions in healthcare settings is still wanting. Despite the proliferation of studies based on Social Network Analysis (SNA) tools and techniques, we still know little about how intervention programs aimed at altering existing patterns of social interaction among healthcare providers affect the quality of service delivery. We update and extend prior reviews by providing a comprehensive assessment of available evidence.

METHODS AND FINDINGS

We searched eight databases to identify papers using SNA in healthcare settings published between 1st January 2010 and 1st May 2022. We followed Chambers et al.'s (2012) approach, using a Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) checklist. We distinguished between studies relying on SNA as part of an intervention program, and studies using SNA for descriptive purposes only. We further distinguished studies recommending a possible SNA-based intervention. We restricted our focus on SNA performed on networks among healthcare professionals (e.g., doctors, nurses, etc.) in any healthcare setting (e.g., hospitals, primary care, etc.). Our final review included 102 papers. The majority of the papers used SNA for descriptive purposes only. Only four studies adopted SNA as an intervention tool, and measured outcome variables.

CONCLUSIONS

We found little evidence for SNA-based intervention programs in healthcare settings. We discuss the reasons and challenges, and identify the main component elements of a network intervention plan. Future research should seek to evaluate the long-term role of SNA in changing practices, policies and behaviors, and provide evidence of how these changes affect patients and the quality of service delivery.

The key features of workplace meetings: Conceptualizing the why, how, and what of meetings at work

Given the focal role that group and team meetings play in shaping employees’ work lives (and schedules), the scarcity of conceptual and empirical attention to the topic in extant organizational psychology research is a major oversight that stalls scientific understanding of organizational behavior more broadly. With the explosion of meetings in recent years, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic, some even wonder why organizational psychology has not already figured out meetings from both a science and practice perspective. The purpose of this paper is to synthesize the extant literature on the science of workplace meetings and sort the works by identifying the key features of the meeting phenomenon. The five key features of workplace meetings identified include Leading, Interacting, Managing Time, Engaging, and Relating. We couch these features within a larger framework of how meetings are the intersection of collaboration in organizations and indispensable to organizational success. Against this conceptual backdrop, we reviewed a total of 253 publications, noting opportunities for future research and discussing practical implications.

Plain Language Summary

Given the focal role that group and team meetings play in shaping employees’ work lives (and schedules), the scarcity of conceptual and empirical attention in extant organizational psychology research is a major oversight that stalls scientific understanding of organizational behavior more broadly. With the explosion of meetings that has occurred in recent years, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic, some even wonder why organizational psychology has not already figured out meetings from both a science and practice perspective. The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on the science of workplace meetings by identifying the core features of the phenomenon and sorting the extant literature along these features. The five core features identified include leading, interacting, managing time, engaging, relating. We couch these features within a larger framework of how meetings are the intersection of collaboration in organizations and a major key to organizational success. Against this conceptual backdrop, we reviewed a total of 253 publications, noting opportunities for future research and discussing practical implications. We conclude our review with an overview of the special issue on workplace meetings, which is an overt attempt to launch research that will fill the theoretical and conceptual gap in the science of meetings.

Debriefing interaction patterns and learning outcomes in simulation: an observational mixed-methods network study

BACKGROUND

Debriefing is effective and inexpensive to increase learning benefits of participants in simulation-based medical education. However, suitable communication patterns during debriefings remain to be defined. This study aimed to explore interaction patterns during debriefings and to link these to participants' satisfaction, perceived usefulness, and self-reported learning outcomes.

METHODS

We assessed interaction patterns during debriefings of simulation sessions for residents, specialists, and nurses from the local anaesthesia department at the Bern University Hospital, Bern, Switzerland. Network analysis was applied to establish distinctive interaction pattern categories based on recorded interaction links. We used multilevel modelling to assess relationships between interaction patterns and self-reported learning outcomes.

RESULTS

Out of 57 debriefings that involved 111 participants, discriminatory analyses revealed three distinctive interaction patterns: 'fan', 'triangle', and 'net'. Participants reported significantly higher self-reported learning effects in debriefings with a net pattern, compared to debriefings with a fan pattern. No effects were observed for participant satisfaction, learning effects after 1 month, and perceived usefulness of simulation sessions.

CONCLUSIONS

A learner-centred interaction pattern (i.e. net) was significantly associated with improved short-term self-reported individual learning and team learning. This supports good-practice debriefing guidelines, which stated that participants should have a high activity in debriefings, guided by debriefers, who facilitate discussions to maximize the development for the learners.

Frontline meetings as support for cross-boundary coordination in hospitals

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate frontline meetings in hospitals and how they are used for coordination of daily operations across organizational and occupational boundaries.

Design/methodology/approach

An in-depth multiple-case study of four purposefully selected departments from four different hospitals is conducted. The selected cases had actively developed and embedded scheduled meetings as structural means to achieve coordination of daily operations.

Findings

Health care professionals and managers, next to their traditional mono-professional meetings (e.g. doctors or nurses), develop additional operational, daily meetings such as work-shift meetings, huddles and hand-off meetings to solve concrete care tasks. These new types of meetings are typically short, task focussed, led by a chair and often inter-disciplinary. The meetings secure a personal proximity which the increased dependency on hospital-wide IT solutions cannot. During meetings, objects and representations (e.g. monitors, whiteboards or paper cards) create a needed gathering point to span across boundaries. As regards embedding meetings, local engagement helps contextualizing meetings and solving concrete care tasks, thereby making health care professionals more likely to value these daily meeting spaces.

Practical implications

Health care professionals and managers can use formal meeting spaces aided by objects and representations to support solving daily and interdependent health care tasks in ways that IT solutions in hospitals do not offer today. Implementation requires local engagement and contextualization.

Originality/value

This research paper shows the importance of daily, operational hospital meetings for frontline coordination. Organizational meetings are a prevalent collaborative activity, yet scarcely researched organizational phenomenon.

Problem Talk in Management Group Meetings

This naturalistic study focuses on problem talk (PT) in hospital management group meetings. The study aims to understand how PT constitutes the hospital organization through the different uses of PT within the meetings, and, therefore, to understand the organizing role of these meetings. The communication as constitutive of organization (CCO) perspective forms the theoretical background of the research. The results of the qualitative analysis show that PT comprises many intertwined tasks that aim to perform the meetings, enhance problem solving, and maintain the relational level of group life. Thus, PT is much more than merely solving problems. In PT, problems are discussed from the viewpoints of the group and the organization. Meetings as an institution and as a nonhuman agent affect organizing because they influence both the group’s communication and organizational processes. Future research on groups should develop the use of the CCO concept of nonhuman agency.

Modeling Temporal Interaction Dynamics in Organizational Settings

Most workplace phenomena take place in dynamic social settings and emerge over time, and scholars have repeatedly called for more research into the temporal dynamics of organizational behavior. One reason for this persistent research gap could be that organizational scholars are not aware of the methodological advances that are available today for modeling temporal interactions and detecting behavioral patterns that emerge over time. To facilitate such awareness, this Methods Corner contribution provides a hands-on tutorial for capturing and quantifying temporal behavioral patterns and for leveraging rich interaction data in organizational settings. We provide an overview of different approaches and methodologies for examining temporal interaction patterns, along with detailed information about the type of data that needs to be gathered in order to apply each method as well as the analytical steps (and available software options) involved in each method. Specifically, we discuss and illustrate lag sequential analysis, pattern analysis, statistical discourse analysis, and visualization methods for identifying temporal patterns in interaction data. We also provide key takeaways for integrating these methods more firmly in the field of organizational research and for moving interaction analytical research forward.