Leadership in interprofessional healthcare teams: Empowering knotworking with followership

Abstract

Healthcare professionals need to be able to collaborate in interprofessional healthcare teams (IHTs). This paper discusses how healthcare professionals (can) contribute to IHT effectiveness. Using cultural historical activity theory and its affiliated concept of knotworking, it argues that healthcare professionals would benefit from developing not just leadership but also followership skills. Moreover, IHT collaborators need the ability to switch fluently between leader and follower roles as appropriate to advance patient care. This fluency is essential for collaborative knotworking. Knotworking refers to the process of tying and retying together individual threads of activity and expertise from across the IHT, over time, to achieve specific objects. Knotworking highlights the dynamic dimensions of IHT collaboration that require professionals to be both effective leaders and followers. The perspectives presented in this paper lead to a different view of IHTs, one that recognizes how leaders and followers co-produce the leadership teams need.

Keywords:

• Knotworking
• leadership
• followership
• healthcare
• CHAT

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lara Varpio

Lara Varpio, PhD, is a professor at the Uniformed Services University. Her research investigates teams (e.g. interprofessional healthcare teams, medical education research and innovation unit teams, and scholarly collaboration teams). She uses qualitative methodologies and methods, along with theories from social sciences and humanities to develop practical and theoretical advances.

Pim Teunissen

Pim Teunissen, PhD, is a professor of workplace learning at Maastricht University and a gynecologist specialized in maternal fetal medicine at Amsterdam University Medical Centers, in the Netherlands. Through his research he contributes to theory building in the domain of learning from work and how education can support that learning process.