The management of services is changing and staff are increasingly being asked to work ‘interprofessionally’ (Tope and Thomas, 2007; Cameron et al, 2009) and to come together in new configurations to deliver services in new ways (Baxter and Brumfitt, 2008). The term ‘interprofessional working’ is often used when different professionals work together, and is also termed interprofessional practice (World Health Organization (WHO), 2010; Interprofessional Education Collaborative Expert Panel, 2011). Interprofessional working affects all organisational members and the very structures of the organisations that support them. As a result, leaders and managers in organisations are required to manage individuals with diverse professional affiliations and skills. This chapter presents a case study to highlight the potential tensions within interprofessional organisations when the professionals refer to their profession's code of ethics, which might be different from those of others. From the author's experience, despite increasing regulation in the workplace, interprofessional working is largely considered solely in relation to professionals delivering care, rather than the organisations they work within and across. Therefore, to confine an analysis of ethical behaviour to those staff formally recognised as professionals (or those working in teams) that deliver care ignores many of the organisational factors that underpin successful interprofessional working.

This chapter highlights the centrality of the organisational context in discussions of professional and interprofessional ethics, with some reference to personal ethics (see Figure 1.1). When considering ethics in the context of organisations, literature suggests that several ethical theories have been used to understand it. For example, Verbos et al (2007) have summarised the organisational theories based on normative and deontological ethical theories, such as stockholder theory, stakeholder theory and post-conventional corporate moral responsibility. The author has on purpose not used an ethical theory as the basis of this chapter, as ethics within an organisation is usually guided by the ethics of the leaders and staff in that organisation, and also because of the need to make this chapter relevant to the other chapters of this book, with their various ethical theories.

Interprofessional teams

Organisations have an important role to play in care delivered by interprofessional teams (Henneman et al, 1995; Zwarenstein and Bryant, 2000; McCallin, 2001; Melia, 2001; D’Amour et al, 2005). What makes a set of individuals a group or a team? There are certainly lots of designated teams in the workplace that do not work as teams.