Organizational Construction and Interdisciplinary Identity in a New Health Care Organization

Abstract

The authors examine the organizational construction of an interdisciplinary brain care center via ethnographic observation of vision and mission-building meetings and semistructured interviews with organizational leaders. The authors find that success in interdisciplinary work at this organization is determined by three factors: (1) a “multilingual” leader who is able to both manage and traverse boundaries between disciplines, (2) a clear and compelling process of problem formation that resulted in a vision and mission that were shared by all participants, and (3) a team whose members have idiosyncratic career paths and identities not firmly rooted in a single scientific discipline or profession.