Table 2.
Management practices, problems, and solutions
| Management practices | Problems | Solutions | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intrapersonal | |||
| Accountability and responsibility | Challenges for team members related to time constraints, role confusion, limited motivation, and other contextual pressures | Emphasize structure and clarity in role definition, engage individual activities, foster collaboration among group members, and promote positive communication | Team members assigned to different tasks based on expertise in order to meet shared goals |
| Interpersonal | |||
| Leadership | Supportive leadership across disciplines may be a complex and lengthy process | Engage scholars in identifying goals and objectives at different levels of leadership. Set time frames and check progress regularly across team members | Institutional leaders can create synergies across professional schools by convening scientists and providing a vision, resources, and support for collaboration across a university setting |
| Organizational | |||
| Exposure to other disciplines | Exclusive focus on specialty journals, conferences, and training that challenge scholars to go beyond their discipline | Develop interdisciplinary team training early in graduate education and reshape conceptualized roles, influence the likelihood of future interdisciplinary interactions, and normalize those interactions | Medical and nursing schools that successfully implement programs for students to learn about patient care and health-care delivery in a team-based context |
| Power and hierarchy | Power hierarchies may negatively influence how members from different disciplines interact and engage when working toward a common goal | Achieving equal voice on the team and concurrent perceptions of safety when interacting across discipline is a necessary component of effective interdisciplinary DII research. Emphasis needs to be placed on diverse levels of institutions, policies, leaders, teams, and collaboration | Setting a team culture and practice whereby clinicians from diverse disciplines (pharmacy, nursing, medicine, social work, and allied health services) equally contribute to the research collaboration. This is also through team members’ appreciation and value of different training and experiences |
| Physical environment | |||
| Structure and isolation | Tendency of single disciplines to create structural and ideological silos decreasing opportunities for multidisciplinary teams to define accountability and responsibility that are meaningful | Emphasize collaboration in publications, revenue streams, quality metrics, memoranda of understanding, and tenure criteria. Aligning incentives to promote interdisciplinary partnerships | Large collaboration between HMO Research Network’s Virtual Data Warehouse and the University of California Research Data Exchange Scientist |
| Communication, taxonomy, and language | Structural content of communication across disciplines, which lacks congruence to develop coherent principles and paradigms | Develop consolidated frameworks for a variety of DII research areas by engaging different disciplines in the process of unifying conceptual and methodological approaches | Exploring National Institutes of Health resources on building interdisciplinary teams for potential solutions such as meetings with researchers from different departments in order to consolidate information under a unifying framework |
DII, dissemination, implementation, and improvement.