Although team-based care has been shown in many sectors to improve outcomes, very little work has been done with the thoracic surgical patient. This review article focuses on this and, extrapolating from other closely related surgical fields, teamwork in thoracic surgery will be reviewed for outcome efficacy and substance.

The optimal team has been shown to display behaviors that allow them to model future needs, predict disaster, be adaptable to change, and promote team cohesiveness all with a positive effect on perioperative outcome. The suboptimal team will have transactional leadership, poor communication, ineffective conflict resolution, and hold rigid beliefs about other team members.

To improve outcome, the thoracic surgical team, centered on the anesthesiologist and surgeon, will display the ‘Big 5’ attributes of highly effective teams. There are attributes of poor teams, which the dyad should avoid in order to increase the team's function and thus outcome.