Understanding work group culture on rehabilitation units: the key to facilitating group innovation and promoting integration.

Understanding work group culture is essential for the smooth running of today's complex rehabilitation units. Failure to understand a unit's culture can impede necessary care delivery innovations and impair group integration. This article describes the phenomenon of work group culture and offers suggestions for assessing and understanding a given unit's culture. It also illustrates how an understanding of work group culture can facilitate innovation by reframing and tailoring a change and can promote integration by helping nurses adjust to a new unit.