Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2024, Psychology

School mental health (SMH) teams have been widely recommended as a strategy elementary schools can use to support multi-tiered mental health programs for students. While frequently recommended, little is known about the feasibility of schools using a team approach. Limited available research suggests best practices for teams, but it is unclear whether these strategies are widely adopted. The current study surveyed a crosssectional sample of elementary principals across the United States to understand the prevalence of SMH teams (among schools implementing multi-tiered SMH programs). When teams were present, principals (n = 280) provided quantitative data about best practices and staffing processes used by their teams. When teams were not present, principals (n = 34) were asked to provide qualitative comments describing their non-team approach and barriers/facilitators to teaming. Most (89%) schools in this sample use teams to support multi-tiered SMH programs, indicating context validity for a team approach to multi-tiered SMH implementation. Schools' size and community context were associated with team and best practice presence. Findings indicate that principals may attend to staff availability, interest, and disciplines to select team members that will be engaged and willing to stay on the team. Community support may also impact SMH teaming. The findings of this study are presented to provide recommendations for practice and future research directions that can support SMH teaming (and therefore SMH program implementation), aiming to improve youth mental health.

Committee: Paul Flaspohler PhD (Committee Chair); Kristy Brann PhD (Committee Member); Elizabeth Kiel PhD (Committee Member); Vaishali Raval PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Education; Mental Health; Psychology

Psy. D., Antioch University, 2021, Antioch New England: Clinical Psychology

This dissertation explored interdisciplinary team functioning on a long-term adolescent inpatient psychiatric unit. It compared staff perceptions (MHCs, clinicians, and nurses) of interdisciplinary coherence and unit effectiveness. This study was particularly focused on understanding MHCs perceptions of team functioning and how satisfied team members are with their level of input and involvement in team decision-making. Additionally, this study explored possible barriers to effective team functioning in this setting. Eighty-four participants in this study completed the Interdisciplinary Team Process and Performance Survey (ITPPS) to assess perceptions of team functioning. Participants answered additional questions assessing barriers to communication and collaboration and levels of satisfaction with their input in the team's decision-making process. A one-way ANOVA was conducted to compare perceptions of team cohesion and team effectiveness across occupations. Results suggest that there is a significant difference among the three occupational groups regarding their perceptions of how their team functions, with MHCs having more negative perceptions of team processes than nurses and clinicians. This team ranked the three highest barriers to communication and collaboration: (a) Differences in accountability, payment, and rewards; (b) Hierarchy; and (c) Lack of training for MHCs. Regarding levels of satisfaction, results showed that MHCs reported the lowest levels of satisfaction, while clinicians rated the highest levels of satisfaction. With these findings, recommendations were made for ways in which long-term inpatient adolescent psychiatric hospitals can work to improve their interdisciplinary team functioning to increase job satisfaction and improve patient care.

Committee: Martha Straus Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Barbara Belcher-Timme Psy.D. (Committee Member); George Tremblay Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Clinical Psychology

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2017, Management

Climate change studies are of paramount importance to today's society at large. Due to the complexity of the phenomenon, the Environmental Science field relies often upon interdisciplinary teams to address burning research issues. This form of interdisciplinary research is often difficult due to the divergent institutional logics that the team members subscribe to (represented by the tenets of their communities of practice, dominant epistemological frameworks and dispositions toward data). This forces researchers to synthesize incommensurate forms of data and warrants into their scientific arguments. I conduct a qualitative field study to answer the following research question: how do multi-disciplinary environmental science teams enact affordances in the cyberinfrastructure to ameliorate such conflicting logics? The study contributes to the nascent literature on the new forms of evidence giving enabled by cyberinfrastructures within the scientific community. It builds upon a socio-technical framework as to account for how affordances enacted within cyberinfrastructure either ameliorate or exacerbate the conflicting institutional logics associated with evidence giving and interpretation across diverse fields. I conclude by discussing how emerging issues of new forms of logics of evidence giving and use impact the effectiveness of interdisciplinary inquiry.

Committee: Kalle Lyytinen PhD (Committee Chair) Subjects: Information Systems

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 1990, Organizational Behavior

Creative teams spanning disciplines, departments, organizational levels, and organizations are growing in use and impact. This research sought factors strongly associated with their success. Value engineering was selected as the focus for its 40 year, global, multi-industry history and its leader certification program. (Value engineering organizes ad hoc teams of 5 to 25 people representing relevant disciplines and stakeholders to invent or discover possible improvements to designs.) A questionnaire asked certified experts to select three of their studies and to rate each case on 77 items which were developed from the literatures of creativity, creative problem solving, and value engineering. Forty-three experts reported 128 cases from a variety of industries, predominantly product manufacturing and building. The strongest influence on study impact and success was the openness of the client organization to ideas and change, but openness and acceptance seemed to be higher (not lower) when teams had more insights and shifts in problem definition. Selecting representative, well qualified teams and facilitating them with techniques such as function analysis and brainstorming seems to result in the required insight, AHA's, and shifts in problem definition. Studies which relied on idea productivity or on team member expertise without deliberate efforts to create new insights were less successful. The results support using the subjective experiences of AHA's and insight to tap into the paradigm shifting, set breaking, frame breaking, and problem redefining aspects of the creative experience. Since shifts in assumptions and beliefs are also meaningful at the group and organizational level, such an approach seems promising for analyzing the creativity of organizations and other social systems construction. Because 30% of the associations were significant at p <.05, a threshold of tau-C >.3 selected the strongest 5% of the associations (all p <.001) for exploration.

Committee: William Pasmore (Advisor) Subjects: Psychology, Industrial