The Influx of Overseas Trained Health Care Professionals: Identity Dynamics In Health Care Teams

The ability to negotiate one’s multiple social identities has become an important issue for members as interaction and interdependence in complex teams increases, and yet has the potential for confusion and errors. In this study, we conducted 87 interviews to explore the intrapersonal identities held by members of patient care teams, and the inter-relationship between them. We were interested in how these identity relationships might affect coordination in these teams. We also explored how intrapersonal and interpersonal interactions affected quality of performance, and attempted to uncover potential points of leverage which might be used to improve these outcomes, by enhancing positive implications of multiple sources of identity in teams. Our results indicate that multiple identity conflict is endemic in teams and often leads to interpersonal friction. In particular, our results suggest that multiple identity conflict in complex teams can be conceptualized as a team-level characteristic as there emerges a central tendency among members of the team to experience a similar level of identity conflict among one’s identities through processes of convergence and compilation. Together, the study contributes not only to the identity and team literature but also provides important recommendations for policy guidelines in global healthcare management, future research and practice improvement.