What could we learn from team sports? Cohesion as a lens to understand research teams in health professions education

CONTEXT: Research in health professions education (HPE) is increasingly produced by collaborative teams that transcend disciplinary, institutional and professional boundaries. Yet, despite the centrality of these teams to the field's scholarly output, we know little about the social and structural dynamics that enable research teams to function well. In this Cross-Cutting Edge paper, we argue that the concept of cohesion-well established in sport psychology as a determinant of team performance-offers a productive and underexplored lens for understanding HPE research teams. Cohesion captures both the task-related alignment that enables members to pursue shared scholarly goals and the social bonds that support communication, conflict navigation and sustained collaboration. DISCUSSION: Drawing on Carron's multidimensional model of team cohesion, we adapt four determinants of cohesion to the context of HPE research, including environmental, personal, leadership and team-level factors. We propose that these factors provide a conceptual scaffold for examining how research teams develop, function and sustain collaborative work over time. To support this argument, we integrate insights from sport psychology, team science and recent scholarship describing the nature of HPE research teams. Positioning cohesion as a conceptual lens opens new avenues for empirical inquiry into the life cycle of research teams, the conditions under which they thrive and the practices that support their development. CONCLUSION: Greater attention to cohesion may strengthen research capacity, enhance team functioning and support high-quality collaborative inquiry in HPE.