Teams in Public Administration: A Field Study of Team Feedback and Effectiveness in the Israeli Public Healthcare System

Over recent years, public organizations have increasingly adopted work teams as an organizational tool for improving task coordination, communication, and knowledge transfer. In this research, I discuss action teams in public organizations and the importance of team feedback for the effectiveness of such professionally heterogeneous public teams. I examine two alternative approaches to team feedback, guided team reflexivity and peer assessment, and hypothesize regarding their effects on team processes and performance. Using a field-based, experimental design involving surgical teams in a large public tertiary health care center, I compared the effects of team reflexivity and peer assessment on specific team-related processes and task duration. I found that guided team reflexivity is related to higher levels of team attention to detail, cooperation, and psychological safety than peer assessment, and that team attention to detail mediates the relationship between feedback type and performance.