Training for Multi-Team Working: A Systematic Review of Training Approaches, Competencies, and Outcomes

Multi-team working is increasingly prevalent across a wide range of organisations. When a superordinate team consisting of several sub-teams combine their expertise, it can support the accomplishment of complex tasks that go beyond the capabilities of a single team (Mathieu et al., 2001). For example, to respond to a major emergency, Police, Fire, Ambulance and other emergency teams must combine their skillsets to save lives; or in an operating theatre, teams of nurses, surgeons and anaesthetists must work together to successfully operate upon a patient. Despite the many advantages of multi-team working for achieving complex goals, the disparity in skillsets, knowledge, and familiarity across sub-team members can lead to teamwork challenges, such as poor communication, poor role understanding and conflicting goals (Power, 2018). DeChurch and Zaccaro (2010) argue that to understand these teams, we must focus research at the system-level rather than team-level to incorporate the added complexity that arises from multi-team systems. Understanding how to mitigate or prevent such challenges is the key to effective multi-agency collaboration.

multi-team training must be pitched at a level that supports learning about how teams can best work together, without duplicating roles and skillsets

One way to address the complexity created by multi-teamworking is through the development of training to develop the shared and complementary attitudes, behaviours and cognitions of team members (Salas, 2015). Yet, designing training to meet the needs of this population of interest – individuals from across teams – is inherently complex (Berger et al., 2026). Team members may lack basic knowledge about the capabilities of other sub-teams, and so pitching the training at a level that supports knowledge transfer and bridges gaps across the team network must be carefully considered. Not only must trainers consider the knowledge and skills that need to be shared across team members, but they must also consider the information that does not need to be shared to avoid overload. For example, a paramedic working alongside a firefighter to save a patient from a burning building does not need to know how to extricate them, and nor does the firefighter need to know how to provide medical interventions. Instead, multi-team training must be pitched at a level that supports learning about how teams can best work together, without duplicating roles and skillsets. Additionally, the logistical complexities of trying to bring together sub-teams across different organisational groups to engage in joint training is challenged by issues such as funding and availability (Power et al., 2025). As such, it is important that multi-team training is both theoretically informed to effectively teach across diverse teams, and that the training itself is valid and robust to incentivise efforts to overcome logistical constraints, providing value for time and money.

The goal of this paper was to systematically review the academic research that has sought to evaluate multi-team training. Specifically, we explored:

• the different types of multi-team training;
• the pedagogical tools utilised for training;
• the theoretical basis to training design; and
•  the competencies that are targeted and evaluated during training.