The Effectiveness of Interdisciplinary Team Dynamics on Treatments in a Behavioral Health Environment

The style of leadership in an interdisciplinary collaboration is an existing gap in collaborative literature. Studying the leaders in an existing interdisciplinary collaboration provided a description of the leadership style of the collaborative leaders of three behavioral health teams in New York City. This qualitative phenomenological study used structured interviews of interdisciplinary disciplines to describe the leadership style of the collaborative leaders within a team environment. The data collection and analysis were conducted using codes to identify dominant themes. The themes presented perceptions and experiences of three teams interacting collaboratively. The coding process identified five major themes that are unique components of leadership that suggests new methods of building collaborative leadership within the interdisciplinary team dynamics.

With effective leadership or consultation, team members learn how to confront
conflict in the group, dispel the distorted images they have of one another, and
work together to construct consensual solutions to recurrent problems in
delivering care (Farrell et al.). O'Donnell et al. (1997) clearly delineated the
problems faced by disciplines when placed together in groups. Each discipline's
normal discourse is altered. The groups derive new systems of discourse that are
developed by the ...