Collaboration Expertise in Health Care - Mapping the Mosaic of Shared Work Experience, Transactive Memory System and Performance

Abstract

In all domains teams knowledge of the others team members’ expertise is of high importance and has been named transactive memory system (TMS). Especially in healthcare, where teams are often formed ad-hoc and the performance directly reflects patients’ wellbeing, the relationship between TMS, shared collaborative experience and performance needs to be examined. This study examines this relationship in the context of nursing. Knowledge about the teammate’s domains of expertise should only have a performance-critical impact in tasks innate to the own profession, while general collaboration tasks should not benefit from a strong TMS. 52 nurses of which about half had working experience together filled out a TMS questionnaire. Two groups of dyads (with and without prior shared work experience) performed one task of their own profession and one domain-general task. The results could show that performance in the working-domain specific task was higher in the group with shared experience than in the group without shared experience. No difference could be found in the domain-general task. This study adds evidence to the body of literature that collaboration is a domain-specific skill and that performance depends on it. Methodological implications to possibly improve TMS and collaboration expertise in teams are discussed.