"In a hospital, for example, it’s the experienced nurses who often guide the newbie residents through the maze of patient care delivery, despite being outranked by the resident."

This sounds a lot like the military trope about new officers, fresh out of school, needing to leverage their NCOs' expertise to get plugged into the new role, despite outranking them. I wonder if there is military research re: unit cohesion etc. that would be applicable to these healthcare settings. Both settings involve stressful enviroments where interpersonal dynamics are critical to success, navigated by personnel trained in systemically-defined roles where it is assumed that you might be filling a hole in a well-established team as much as you might be thrust into a new team where no one knows each other—and expected to execute.