Exploring the concept of team resilience in healthcare—a phased principle-based concept analysis and potentials for development

Sustaining safety in healthcare requires interaction among multiple actors. Teams are pivotal for work in healthcare organizations, making constant adaptations while facing the challenges of everyday work. Healthcare teams are central for the emergence of resilience. Despite this, team resilience in healthcare has not been clearly defined. Exploring the definition, conceptualization, and operationalization of team resilience in healthcare could support further theoretical and practical development toward conceptual coherence. Based on a phased ­principle-based concept analysis, team resilience in healthcare was ­understood relatively consistently, but an unambiguous definition was lacking. Two aspects, systemic and team, compose a dualistic component of team resilience in healthcare, affecting both concept and ­characteristics in the definition. The presence of resilience skills and interactions between individuals completed the concept of team resilience, which was previously broadly defined as an emergent system property. The current paper proposes a new model and a theoretical definition. Team resilience in healthcare is a two-faced concept. Further triangulation to adjacent concepts and studies of how teams contribute to resilience may help to further clarify the conceptual components and support robust operationalization.