Organization of multi-professional teamwork in technology-mediated work environments
Abstract
Multi-professional collaboration is assumed to tackle ambiguous and difficult challenges with innovative teamwork. First, expertise from many fields is needed for solving difficult problems in society and organisations, which emerge from a complicated reality. Second, tasks in working life encompass many fields, meaning that multi-professional expertise is needed. Third, the expertise has to be organised as interactive teamwork for approaching ambiguous questions. However, multi-professional collaboration is challenging, due to different knowledge bases and related working methods of each professional grouping involved, but, with digitalization, multi-professional collaboration could become more commonplace, as the technology-mediated work environment is shared by all professional groupings in the workplace. Technology tends to mainstream working patterns and practices, which could be assumed to reshape professional work and multi-professional collaboration. The article studies how multi-professional teamwork is organised in firms with an advanced technology-mediated work environment in the new media and high-technology industry. The methodological approach is qualitative and three case studies are presented. The outcome of the analysis reveals variations in the patterns of organising multi-professional teamwork, which is related to the function and position of the teams and the rationality of the firm.
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