The nursing team and the myth of group work

This paper has two objectives: the first one is analyzing the individual behaviors indicated by non-verbal communication during shift exchanges; the second one is analyzing group behavior during shift exchanges based on the observation the videotaped scenes of a nursing staff during a shift exchange. A list of non-verbal communication signs was used to analyze individual behaviors. The concepts group were used to analyze group behaviors. The results showed that ineffective non-verbal signs prevailed over effective ones and inadequate non-verbal signs were more visible than the adequate ones. One may conclude that shift exchange was not a group activity.