How Is the Team Feeling? How Emotions of Members Impact Teamwork in Primary Healthcare

Background: Healthcare professionals' ability to recognize, understand, and manage their own emotions, understand and influence the emotions of others, and feel psychologically safe in their clinics are essential. However, the influence of a healthcare professional's emotional regulation, experience of psychological safety, and emotional intelligence on teamwork in Primary Care lacks robust examination. Emotional regulation is an individual's internal mechanism of emotional reactions, which can be cognitive reappraisal or expressive suppression. Team literature has identified psychological safety as the feeling of safety to address team actions critically. Emotional intelligence is a set of emotional processing abilities, including awareness and management of one's and others' emotions. This study aimed to determine if an individual's emotional regulation strategy influenced the effectiveness of the primary healthcare team. And how feeling psychologically safe and having emotional intelligence influenced team effectiveness.

Methods: This pilot study was a quantitative research design using a cross-sectional survey to investigate the relationship between respondents' emotional constructs and their perceptions of effective teamwork. Participants were recruited from primary healthcare clinics, obtaining a convenience sample of N = 45. The estimated power of the sample was 0.26 with a 0.95 confidence interval for a small effect. The sample participants included 18- to 44-year-olds (48.9%) and 45 and older (51/1%), primarily women (73.3%), and had worked ≤ 5 years (53.3%) in their clinics.

Predictor variables included emotional regulation strategy--cognitive reappraisal or emotional suppression (Emotional Regulation Questionnaire); perceived safety in taking interpersonal risks (Team Psychological Safety, TPS); and emotional intelligence (Workplace Emotional Intelligence Profile (WEIP). Dependent variables included team communication (Interdisciplinary Team Process and Performance), cooperation (Scale of Cooperative Goals), and satisfaction with the team. All survey instruments were previously validated, structured uniformly, and used Likert-type scales.

Simple OLS regression was used to examine the effects of psychological safety (PS) and emotional intelligence (EI) on perceived team communication, cooperation, and satisfaction, and multiple OLS regression was used to examine the controlled net effects of PS and EI on the dependent variables.

Results: The ERQ results identified 80% of respondents as cognitive reappraisers, and cognitive reappraisers were associated with being older and having longer tenures. The multiple regression analyses of PS and EI demonstrated statistically significant predictive relationships with team communication (60.4%), cooperation (65.5%), and satisfaction (66.7%). These results demonstrated that feeling more psychologically safe on your team was related to perceptions of better team communication, better cooperation, and higher satisfaction in the team. And having higher team emotional intelligence was associated with perceptions of better team communication, better cooperation, and higher satisfaction with the team.

Implications: These findings emphasize the importance of PS and EI in the Primary Care clinic. Social workers may use this knowledge to improve the socio-emotional support of staff and providers in delivering quality health care. The findings of this study highlight how emotions influence team communication, cooperation, and satisfaction, which could inform the social workers on how best to support team emotional management.