Team adaptive capacity and adaptation in dynamic environments: A scoping review of the literature

Sanford N., Lounsbury O., Reedy G., Rafferty DAM., Anderson JE.

Healthcare systems rely on the expertise, ingenuity, and resilience of healthcare teams to maintain safe and high-quality care in complex, variable, and resource-constrained environments. Research has suggested that successful team adaptation prevents patient harm, optimises efficiency, and keeps healthcare systems running. Team adaptation is a central concept in both teamworking and organisational resilience theory, but team adaptation and its associated concepts, specifically team adaptive capacity, remain underspecified, ill-defined, and poorly understood in healthcare. Other high-risk industries, such as aviation, military, and nuclear power, may have a more extensive evidence base that can inform conceptualisations in healthcare and beyond. This scoping review synthesizes the cross-disciplinary literature on team adaptation, proposes a new definition for team adaptive capacity, and develops a model for understanding team adaptation, its outcomes, and antecedents: the team adaptive cycle.

DOI

10.1016/j.hfh.2024.100089

Type

Journal article

Publication Date

2024-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

Volume

6

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