Team decision-making

The puqose of this paper is to help team members and managers to improve decision-making in multidisciplinay teams. It presents concepts which teams have used to diagnose the causes of slow or poor decision-making, and which have helped teams to agree decision-making procedures. It is based on a programme of action research with primary and specialist community multidisciplinay teams in the UK (Øvretveit, 1993). The paper justifies the three assumptions which underlie the proposed approach: that effective decision-making is central to successful multidisciplinary teamwork; that improvements come from paying attention to both formal and informal features of team organisation; and that suitable formal decision-making procedures are necessary for teams to survive.