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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between patient safety culture and two attitudinal constructs: affective organizational commitment and structural empowerment. In doing so, the main and interaction effects of the two constructs on the perception of patient safety culture were assessed using a cohort of physicians.

Affective commitment was measured with the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire, whereas structural empowerment was assessed with the Conditions of Work Effectiveness Questionnaire-II. The abbreviated versions of these surveys were administered to a cohort of 71 post-doctoral medical residents. For the data analysis, hierarchical regression analyses were performed for the main and interaction effects of affective commitment and structural empowerment on the perception of patient safety culture.

A total of 63 surveys were analyzed. The results revealed that both affective commitment and structural empowerment were positively related to patient safety culture. A potential interaction effect of the two attitudinal constructs on patient safety culture was tested but no such effect was detected.

This study suggests that there are potential benefits of promoting affective commitment and structural empowerment for patient safety culture in health care organizations. By identifying the positive associations between the two constructs and patient safety culture, this study provides additional empirical support for Kanter’s theoretical tenet that structural and organizational support together helps to shape the perceptions of patient safety culture.

Despite the wide recognition of employee empowerment and commitment in organizational research, there has still been a paucity of empirical studies specifically assessing their effects on patient safety culture in health care organizations. To the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first empirical study to examine the relationship between structural empowerment as proposed by Kanter and the culture of patient safety using physicians.

Research has demonstrated that varying degrees and combinations of individual traits, behaviors and characteristics influence the emergence of leaders in teams. While existing models have shown that such variables affect leader choice independently and interactively, the overall findings suggest that there is still a lack of research on a potentially significant factor, the impact of personal reputation on leader selection in autonomous work teams (AWTs), an increasingly ubiquitous team practice in organizations. This preliminary review thus aims to offer a general overview of personal reputation and its effects on leader emergence in the context of AWTs.

By surveying extant literature on team leader emergence, this review has identified that the potential impact of personal reputation on leader selection in teams is significant yet largely ignored.

Models of leader emergence in teams should incorporate the realistic assumption that teams formed in organizations are often comprised of individuals who have information on others either directly or indirectly. Personal reputation based on an individual’s history thus moderates how one’s behaviors or traits exhibited become contextualized in the overall assessment of leader desirability and selection in teams.

Based on a review of existing research on leadership emergence and personal reputation, this work contends that the external validity and predictive value of leader emergence models would greatly benefit from the inclusion of employee reputations as a moderating variable in the future assessment of the leader emergence process in AWTs.

By designing models that explain the potential effects of personal reputations on leader emergence in self-managed teams, team members and managers can be better elucidated and ultimately improve their understanding of the process of the evaluation and selection of team leaders.

Despite the prolific research on leader emergence, there is still a paucity of studies examining personal reputational effects on leader selection, especially in the context of AWTs. This work is the first review piece calling for the inclusion of personal reputation, a substantive factor overlooked and excluded in previous models, to enhance the current understanding of leader emergence in AWTs.

Previous research has demonstrated that communication failure and interpersonal conflicts are significant impediments among health care teams to assess complex information and engage in the meaningful collaboration necessary for optimizing patient care. Despite the prolific research on the role of effective teamwork in accomplishing complex tasks, such findings have been traditionally applied to business organizations and not medical contexts. This chapter, therefore, reviews and applies four theories from the fields of organizational behavior (OB) and organization development (OD) as potential means for improving team interaction in health care contexts. This study is unique in its approach as it addresses the long-standing problems that exist in team communication and cooperation in health care teams by applying well-established theories from the organizational literature. The utilization and application of the theoretical constructs discussed in this work offer valuable means by which the efficacy of team work can be greatly improved in health care organizations.

This study aims to offer a bibliometric analysis of the already substantial and growing literature on global virtual teams (GVTs).

Using a systematic literature review approach, it identifies all articles in the Web of Science from 1999 to 2021 that include the term GVTs (in the title, the abstract or keywords) and finds 175 articles. The VOSviewer software was applied to analyze the bibliometric data.

The analysis revealed three dialogizing research clusters in the GVTs literature: a pioneering management information systems and organizational cluster, a general management cluster and a growing international management and behavioural studies cluster. Furthermore, it highlights the most cited articles, authors, journals and nations, and the network of strong and weak links regarding co-authorships and co-citations. Additionally, this study shows a change in research patterns regarding topics, journals and disciplinary approaches from 1999 to 2021. Finally, the analysis illustrates the position and centrality in the network of the most relevant actors.

The findings can guide management practitioners, educators and researchers to the most meaningful clusters of publications on GVTs, and help navigate and make sense of the vast body of the available literature. The importance of GVTs has been growing in the past two decades, and Covid-19 has accelerated the trend.

This study provides an updated and comprehensive systematic literature review on GVTs. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is also the first systematic literature review and bibliometry on GVTs. It concludes by suggesting future research paths.