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Collaborative tools have become an integral part of today's business, especially as part of team collaboration. Companies invest in buying or developing collaborative tools because they believe they can save them time, money and resources, which adds value to the business. This paper describes the features of collaborative tools and presents research on the use of collaborative tools in business activities. The survey was conducted via an online questionnaire with three sets of questions on a convenience sample of 52 subjects using a Likert scale. The first set of questions collected data on team collaboration within the companies where the respondents work. The second set of questions collected data on collaborative tools used by the same companies. The third set of questions collected information about the companies themselves. The research confirmed the hypotheses and showed that employees in companies use collaborative tools and that make it easier for them to organize their business, which leads to greater efficiency and productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: With the needs of patients and families who wish for quality, assuring, and safe medical care, and the diversity of medical tasks due to advances in and the complexity of medical care, medical practices has currently been changing from conventional models to team medical care in Japan. Because nurses are engaged in a wide range of tasks in medical settings, from medical checkup and treatment to the assistance of patients in the medical treatment they engage in, they are expected to collaborate with patients, physicians, and other medical staff as the “key person for team medical care” [1]. The roles that nurses are required to play in promoting team medical care are also extremely various, and it is important for team medical care to improve the awareness and skills of individual nurses to enable and effect collaboration. Previous studies reported that there are difficulties in collaboration between nurses and staff in other medical professions due to barriers including the differences in values specific to different medical professionals and the hierarchy comprising physicians [2, 3]. The authors previous study found that physicians give instructions only to nurses they trust and consider reliable, and do not share information with nurses they consider less reliable [4]. In this study, we define team collaboration as the cooperation between nurses and physicians in wards as the key persons, and aim to develop an original scale to evaluate ward team collaboration by examining the elements of the concept hypothesized as factors related to team collaboration by reviewing qualitative studies on team collaboration by the present authors and as reported in previous studies. Methods: We examined hypothesized elements of the concept from a previous study related to team collaboration reported by the authors [4] as well as from the clinical experience of the authors, and from existing scales and qualitative studies, created an item pool of 153 items, and developed an original scale to evaluate ward team collaboration by conducting brainstorming repeatedly with 20 to 25 nursing administration researchers. Finally, we created an original scale to evaluate ward team collaboration comprised of 29 items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Chef's top-secret recipe is the right mix/combination of ingredients, as well as the know-how on how to best cook them together. Babe Ruth (famous American Baseball player) said "The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don't play together, the club won't be worth a dime." We believe that the same rules apply to maximize team creativity. In the past, a lot of emphasis has been placed on understanding and fostering individual creativity, but the complexity and velocity of the challenges and problems that organizations are currently facing can no longer be solved at the individual level, they require team collaboration and team creativity for problem solving and innovation. In this paper, the authors present and synthesize the past and current research approaches and findings centered on the concept of team creativity. They present a theoretical framework that can be used to select the most important ingredients and the right sauce (environment) to compose the best team creativity dish. Bon Appetit!. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovativeness is a decisive factor for a firm's performance since it reflects its capability to adapt to changing conditions. When behavioural innovativeness is concerned, the socially oriented activities of co-operatives suggest that specific values and behaviours within such organisations may influence their innovativeness. Hence, this research aims at better understanding how this co-operative difference impact on the co-operative innovativeness. In order to answer this objective, the research focused on the particular case of the Fédération des caisses populaires acadiennes (FCPA), a Canadian second-level financial service co-operative, and 13 of its credit unions. A questionnaire was administered online to a population of 888 employees, with a response rate of 65.1% (578 respondents). The component analysis of 9 statements on behaviours and values oriented towards innovation and improvement resulted in two factors accounting for a satisfactory 62.5% of the variance. The two factors represented components of the behavioural innovativeness in terms of the supervisor's transformational leadership, and team collaboration. Hypotheses were made suggesting the positive relationship between the two factors and behavioural innovativeness as expressed by the commitment of the employees towards the success of the cooperative and the improved quality of its services. Moreover, it was suggested that a cooperative difference, as perceived by the employees, would positively affect the relationship between the cultural factors and the behavioural innovativeness. Results of the structural analysis of the conceptual framework, using Lisrel 9, showed a significant and positive full mediation of the co-operative difference between the supervisor's transformational leadership and the co-operative behavioural, and a partial mediating role of the co-operative difference between team collaboration and behavioural innovativeness. These results are of interest for cooperative managers. With a focus on specific human resources practices aimed at enhancing an innovative culture at the management and the team levels, they could contribute to build a co-operative difference in the workforce and from these efforts, develop the organisational commitment towards innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a section of abstracts on conference papers in Health Care Management. They include "Understanding Mental Health Treatment in Primary Care with Patient-Physician Interaction Data," examining the mental health treatment process; "Vertical Integration Between Community Hospitals and Nursing Facilities," about resource dependancy theory; and "Downstream Integration and Competitive Strategies in the US Pharmaceutical Industry," regarding vertical integration.

While organizations are increasingly adopting open-plan layouts in order to promote collaboration and team work, researchers have suggested that open-plan offices do not always support collaboration. Furthermore, the negative impacts of distractions and lack of privacy may overshadow any potential positive impact of collaboration. Drawing on situated cognition theory, we conceptualize the open-plan offices as a collaborative scaffold and qualitatively examine collaborative processes in seven teams accommodated in open-plan offices. Our data reveals that open-plan offices scaffold collaboration processes that include instant informal sharing, informal coordination, contextualized cooperation and vicarious learning. Additionally, open-plan offices were shown to facilitate collaborative behaviors under specific conditions such that teams with high-levels of task interdependence and those with developed collaborative norms are able to mitigate the negative aspects of open-plan offices (i.e. distractions and lack of privacy). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]