Department of Population Health, NYU School of Medicine, 180 Madison Ave, 3-52, New York, NY, 10016, USA.
Public Health Nutrition Program, NYU School of Global Public Health, New York, NY, 10016, USA.
BMC Med Educ. 2021 Jan 4;21(1):3. doi: 10.1186/s12909-020-02396-8.
Interdisciplinary research teams can increase productivity among academic researchers, yet many junior investigators do not have the training or financial resources to build productive teams. We developed and tested the acceptability and feasibility of three low-cost services to help junior faculty build and maintain their own research teams.
At an urban academic medical centre, we implemented three types of consultation services: 1) giving talks on evidence-based best practices for building teams; 2) providing easy-to-use team building resources via email; and 3) offering a year-long consultation service-co-led by students-that taught faculty to build and maintain research teams. Our primary outcome was the number of faculty who used each service. For the yearlong consultation service, we asked faculty participants to complete three online self-assessments to rate their leadership confidence, the team's performance, and which of the consultation components were most helpful. We used descriptive statistics to evaluate faculty assessment scores at three timepoints by comparing median scores and interquartile ranges.
We gave 31 talks on team building to 328 faculty and postdoctoral fellows from 2014 to 2020. Separately, 26 faculty heard about our research team building expertise and requested materials via email. For the consultation service, we helped build or enhance 45 research teams from 2014 to 2020. By the end of the consultation, 100% of the faculty reported they were still maintaining their team. In the initial survey, the majority of participants (95.7%, n = 22) reported having no or few experiences in building teams. Further, when asked to rate their team's performance at 12-months, faculty highly rated many elements of both teamwork and taskwork, specifically their team's productivity (6/7 points), morale (6/7 points), and motivation (6/7 points). By the end of the program, faculty participants also highly rated two components of the consultation program: recruitment assistance (7/10 points) and provision of team management tools (7/10 points).
For participating faculty, our program provided valued guidance on recruitment assistance and team management tools. The high demand for team-building resources suggests that junior faculty urgently need better training on how to develop and manage their own team.
跨学科研究团队可以提高学术研究人员的生产力，但许多初级研究员没有培训或财务资源来建立有成效的团队。我们开发并测试了三种低成本服务的可接受性和可行性，以帮助初级教员建立和维持自己的研究团队。
在一家城市学术医疗中心，我们实施了三种类型的咨询服务：1）就建立团队的循证最佳实践进行演讲；2）通过电子邮件提供易于使用的团队建设资源；3）提供为期一年的咨询服务，由学生共同领导，教授教员建立和维持研究团队。我们的主要结果是使用每种服务的教员人数。对于为期一年的咨询服务，我们要求教员参与者完成三项在线自我评估，以评估他们的领导信心、团队的表现以及咨询内容中最有帮助的部分。我们使用描述性统计来通过比较中位数分数和四分位距来评估三个时间点的教员评估分数。
我们在 2014 年至 2020 年间向 328 名教员和博士后研究员进行了 31 次关于团队建设的演讲。另外，有 26 名教员通过电子邮件了解了我们的研究团队建设专业知识并要求提供材料。在咨询服务方面，我们在 2014 年至 2020 年间帮助建立或增强了 45 个研究团队。咨询结束时，100%的教员报告说他们仍在维持团队。在最初的调查中，大多数参与者（95.7%，n=22）报告说他们在团队建设方面没有经验或经验很少。此外，当被问及团队在 12 个月时的表现时，教员高度评价了团队合作和任务工作的许多方面，特别是团队的生产力（6/7 分）、士气（6/7 分）和动力（6/7 分）。在项目结束时，教员参与者还高度评价了咨询计划的两个组成部分：招聘协助（7/10 分）和提供团队管理工具（7/10 分）。
对于参与的教员来说，我们的计划在招聘协助和团队管理工具方面提供了有价值的指导。对团队建设资源的高需求表明，初级教员迫切需要更好的培训，以了解如何开发和管理自己的团队。
