Wednesday, 8 May - 3 PM - 3F Room (DEM)

Abstract

The study examines which configurations of conditions allow ethnically diverse healthcare teams to improve their clinical performance. The study relies on the survey and video data collected on 59 clinical simulations at a simulation center in public hospital southern Sweden and employs a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to explore which combinations of conditions lead to an outcome. The outcome in the study is represented by healthcare teams clinical performance, and the conditions are team ethnic diversity, team size, team members’ work experience, and leadership style (laissez-faire, shared, or autocratic). The findings suggest that a laissez-faire leadership style does not enable either ethnically homogeneous or heterogeneous teams to achieve high performance, and that ethnically diverse healthcare teams perform particularly well in the presence of shared leadership when these teams are larger and less experienced. The study highlights that the benefits of ethnic diversity (learning opportunities) are best realized in teams that structurally facilitate intra-team learning through shared leadership, team members who need to learn (low experience), and team size that allows for many learning opportunities. The study also underscores that healthcare teams, regardless of their ethnic diversity, require active leadership to perform well. The study outlines contributions to the research on diverse teams in healthcare and public organizations and provides policy and managerial implications.

KEYWORDS
ethnic diversity, leadership styles, team clinical performance, healthcare, configurational analysis