Power in Work Groups: Team Member's Perspectives

Power and restrictive participation are often identified as primary issues which can retard the productivity of work groups. The study describes team member responses to a questionnaire regarding bases of social power used within 19 interdisciplinary clinical team meetings and their relationship with team decision-making style, participation in team decisions, and team meeting productivity. Physicians were found to effect almost all treatment decisions, and autocratic decision making was found to be more prevalent than consensual decision making. It is suggested that the generally held belief that the interdisciplinary team approach is equivalent with shared decision making and broad-based participation needs careful re-examination. Implications of the findings for shared decision making in health care teams and work groups in general are discussed. The importance for managers and team leaders to understand and appropriately facilitate the dynamics of power in work groups is emphasized.