Can team coaching provide healthcare the remedy it needs?

Abstract

The healthcare industry is inadvertently a teamwork industry - and yet - little time is devoted to improving teamwork on the field. As a response to this issue, team development intervention (TDI) tools have flourished. Findings suggest the capability for TDIs to better team competencies, and potentially mitigate prominent healthcare problems. However, team coaching has been excluded as a potential TDI for healthcare. For this reason, we seek to 1) discuss existing team coaching models, integrating findings across the literature, 2) highlight the advantages of Hackman and Wageman (2005)'s model over others, 3) display its empirically-corroborated propositions, and finally, 4) provide general guidance on how to move forward. We move beyond extant literature by providing an outline on what outcomes team coaching can and cannot yield, accumulating evidence from fields outside of healthcare and incorporating team coaching into the TDI literature. By doing so, we hope empirical research on team coaching is incentivized, resulting in an efficient and accessible TDI for healthcare professionals and the field of interprofessional care.