Browsing by Subject "moniammatillinen tiimi"

In early childhood education, team members work together particularly closely, which makes the effectiveness of teamwork one of the key elements of the work. The theo-retical basis of this present study lies in the recent administrative changes in early childhood education, together with the development of the teams' areas of expertise and progress of the team formation process, form the basis of the research theory. The goal of this study was to determine the factors influencing the functioning of multi-disciplinary teams working in early childhood education. The research questions ad-dressed here were: 1) What factors influence the functioning of the teams working in the early childhood education? and 2) What do early childhood education teams cur-rently look like from the perspective of a functioning team? The study utilized the Mixed Methods Research (MMR) approach since the study con-sisted of both qualitative and quantitative data. The material of the study has been ex-amined in terms of both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Factor analysis was cho-sen as the method of analysis for the quantitative data, which was used for dimensional reduction resulting in the data condensed into five main latent factors which each ex-plained several variables. The qualitative analysis used theory-guided data analysis, in which the data were first broken down into smaller parts, conceptualized and assem-bled into a new whole. The results of the research revealed there are five factors explaining team functionalities in early childhood education. The factors were labelled as commitment and trust, communication, team building, participation and leadership. These factors, which are correlated with each other to some degree, taken together play a crucial role in team formation, bonding and successful teamwork. As such, this current study should inform future studies in early childhood education teamwork formation and flow.