Knowledge integration, teamwork and performance in health care

Knowledge integration is the process of building shared mental models. The integration of the diverse knowledge of the health professions in shared mental models is a precondition for effective teamwork and team performance. As it is known that different groups of health care professionals often tend to work in isolation, the authors compared the perceptions of knowledge integration. It can be expected that based on this isolation, knowledge integration is assessed differently. The purpose of this paper is to test these differences in the perception of knowledge integration between the professional groups and to identify to what extent knowledge integration predicts perceptions of teamwork and team performance and to determine if teamwork has a mediating effect.

The study is a multi-center cross-sectional study with a descriptive-explorative design. Data were collected by means of a staff questionnaire for all health care professionals working in the rehabilitation clinics.

The results showed that there are significant differences in knowledge integration within interprofessional health care teams. Furthermore, it could be shown that knowledge integration is significantly related to patient-centered teamwork as well as to team performance. Mediation analysis revealed partial mediation of the effect of knowledge integration on team performance through teamwork.

In practice, the results of the study provide a valuable starting point for team development interventions.

This is the first study that explored knowledge integration in medical rehabilitation teams and its relation to patient-centered teamwork and team performance.