A Multidisciplinary Collaborative Management and Consulting Model: The Inner Workings and Future Challenges

A typical consulting service involves a specialist (the consultant) being invited to lend his or her expertise to an organization, group, or individual (the client). Multiple consultants can come together on the same project, making the format more complex because the consultants now work as a team. The literature refers to intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary teams, indicating persons with different specialties and/or interests, but all within the same discipline. A multidisciplinary team is composed of consultants from different disciplines working as a unit. Articles emphasizing the strengths and obstacles encountered by collaborative teams-multidisciplinary or otherwise-are beginning to appear in the literature (Hinshaw & DeLeon, 1995; McCall, 1990).