The Potency Modeling And Empirical Research Of Online Medical Teams From A Cross-level Perspective

[Objective]Currently,improving the provision of healthcare services is the key to alleviating the uneven distribution of medical resources.Considering that the limitation of traditional medical service and the online services provided by individuals in improving the service provision especially the service quality,collaborations in online medical teams have advantages in improving the provision of medical services.Therefore,systematic research on team potency has extremely important theoretical and practical value.Based on the characteristics of online medical teams and theories such as Upper Echelon Theory,Social Exchange Theory,Identity Theory,Collective Action Theory,Team Potency Model and other theoretical and framework foundations,this paper constructs a optimization model of team potency from a cross-level perspective.Especially,this paper explores the top-bottom,bottom-up and parallel effects defined according to the direction of the impact mechanism to improve three dimensions of team potency,which are the dimensions of team survival and service provision at the team level,and the dimension of meeting the needs of members at the individual level.In summary,this study can provide theoretical and practical support for understanding online medical teams better,improving the provision of medical services and promoting the development of online healthcare communities.[Methods]In this paper,the data and information about online medical teams and its members had been crawled from Haodf.com,one leading online healthcare community in China.This study firstly comprehensively used various methods such as literature research,macro-environment analysis,comparative analysis and stakeholder analysis to introduce the background and summarize the factors of team potency.In addition,methods of empirical analysis included data mining,cross-section data analysis,instrumental variable and other methods.Specifically,this paper a)used hierarchical linear regression to study the impacts of professional capital and team heterogeneity on team performance,b)used hierarchical Logistic regression to analyze the influences of leader types and diversity on team status,and c)combined instrumental variable model,non-linear impact regression model and other regression methods to investigate the influence mechanisms of individual efforts,team size and team identity on individual performance.[Results]First,this study researched on the impacts of professional capital and team heterogeneity on team performance.The empirical results showed that decision capital of the team was most influential(?=0.605,p<0.01),and the decision capital and status capital of team leader,as well as status capital of the team,had significant effects on team performance(?=0.178,p<0.01;?=0.524,p<0.01;?=-0.045,p<0.1);team heterogeneity had a negative impact on team service quantity(?=-0.458,p<0.01),but it positively moderated the relationships between the leader' professional capital(including decision capital and status capital)and team performance(?=0.091,p<0.05;?=0.133,p<0.05).Second,this study investigated the impacts of member diversity and leader types on team status.The results showed that variety diversity was a risk factor for team disbandment(?=0.251,p<0.1),and disparity diversity,strong and equal leader types were all protective factors for team disbandment(?=-2.470,p<0.1;?=-4.636,p<0.01;?=-3.554,p<0.01).In addition,both strong and equal leader types positively moderated the impacts of diversity on team disbandment(?=0.861,p<0.01;?=0.304,p<0.1),so these two leader types should pairwise combine with low variety diversity to reduce the probablity of team disbandment.Third,this study explored the influence mechanisms of members' efforts and team identity on individual performance.The results showed that both the individual efforts and team identity significantly had positive impacts on the number of graphic consultation(?=2.833,p<0.01;?=0.173,p<0.05;?=26.18,p<0.01;?=17.38,p<0.01),and significantly had positive impacts on the amount of telephone consultation services(?=0.0195,p<0.01;?=0.0015,p<0.05;?=0.360,p<0.01;?=0.107,p<0.01).In most cases,team identity positively moderated relationships between individual efforts and individual performance,but it was noteworthy that leader identity negatively moderated the relationship between peripheral efforts and the amount of telephone consultation(?=-0.179,p<0.1).Finally,this study researched the influences of team identity and team size on individual performance.Empirical results showed that team identity had positive impacts on the individual performance(?=18.276,p<0.1;?=15.586,p<0.1);a non-linear correlation between team size and individual performance was explored and suggested an inverted U-shaped relationship.In addition,the team size negatively moderated the relationship between the multiple-team-membership identity and individual performance(?=-17.925,p<0.1),so the potency of team members can be influenced by team size and team identity based on the results.[Conclusions]Team-based services online have practical effects on improving the provision of healthcare services,so more attention should be paid to improve the team potency.Based on the empirical results,appropriate leader-member structure and team size,central and peripheral efforts,and team identity should be encouraged to promote the team potency and meet the demands of healthcare services.This paper enriches related research on online health community,virtual team,diversity and team potency,and verifies the generalizability of Collective Action Theory,Upper Echelon theory and other theories in the field of healthcare service.According to the empirical conclusions,this study proposes strategies for various parties and an optimization model for the potency of online medical team.[Innovation and Deficiency]For the innovation,first,this study concerns the unique characteristic of online medical teams,diversity,to empirically explore its effects(i.e.,the impacts of team-level heterogeneity and individual-level member diversity on team potency).In addition,the two sub-researches of the potency at the team level respectively study the factors affecting team performance and team negative status(such as team disbandment)from both positive and negative perspectives.Second,the cross-level influence mechanisms between the online medical team and members can comprehensively reflect their relationships.Meanwhile,Collective Action Theory,Identity Theory,and Social Influence Theory are used to examine effects of team size,team identity and members' efforts on individual performance in this research,enriching the theoretical basis of related research in online healthcare community.Third,based on three dimensions of team potency,this paper constructs the potency model of online medical teams.Thus,it enriches related research,and is conducive to further studies.For the deficiency,according to existing researches,online frequency and the number of articles on the homepage of the doctors are used to measure the central and peripheral efforts,which can not reflect other dimensions of doctors' efforts.Second,the instrumental variable method and the research design are conducive to weaken endogenity issues of models.The lack of some team information such as the establishment time makes potential endogenity issues of some models fail to completely solve,and futher study could be conducted using panel data analysis to solve this issue.Third,although the online healthcare community,Haodf.com,is representative in China,our findings may not be generalizable to other online healthcare communities.