6 Three Perspectives on Team Learning

Abstract

The emergence of a research literature on team learning has been driven by at least two factors. First, longstanding interest in what makes organizational work teams effective leads naturally to questions about how members of newly formed teams learn to work together and how existing teams improve or adapt. Second, some have argued that teams play a crucial role in organizational learning. These interests have produced a growing and heterogeneous literature. Empirical studies of learning by small groups or teams present a variety of terms, concepts, and methods. This heterogeneity is both generative and occasionally confusing. We identify three distinct areas of research that provide insight into how teams learn to stimulate cross-area discussion and future research. We find that scholars have made progress in understanding how teams in general learn, and propose that future work should develop more precise and context-specific theories to help guide research and practice in disparate task and industry domains.

Notes

1. Memory differentiation was “the tendency for group members to specialize in remembering distinct aspects” of the task, task coordination was “the ability of group members to work together smoothly”, and task credibility was “how much the group members trusted one another's knowledge” about the task, all of which characterized a strong TMS (Liang et al., 1995, p. 388–389).

2. Task motivation was “how eager the group members were to win the award” for task completion, group cohesion was “the level of interpersonal attraction among group members,” and social identity “the tendency for subjects to think about themselves as team members rather than individuals” (p. 389).

3. Task environment was denned as volatile if a team frequently switched tasks; knowledge environmentwas denned as volatile if team members quickly forgot unutilized knowledge. The organizational context was rated “stable” if a team was low on both dimensions and “dynamic” if it was high on both dimensions.

4. Other leader and team characteristics did not predict learning: leader consider ation, leader initiation of process structure, product complexity, and team functional diversity.

5. Survey items measured members' anticipated behavioral change on future prod uct-development teams or on work in other areas of the organization.

6. The authors called this variable a “problem solving orientation,” but the items used in the measure clearly related to what team-learning researchers have called “learning behaviors.”

7. For example, two studies find opposite effects of low-to-mo derate subgroup strength on learning behavior (Gibson & Vermeulen, 2003; Lau & Murnighan, 2005). Likewise, some find a learning orientation to be consistently good for performance (Ely & Thomas, 2001) while others find it good only in small doses (Bunderson & Sutcliffe, 2003).

8. As noted, Hackman's (1987) model provides an exemplar of how to cluster sets of related variables (effort, knowledge and skills, action strategies) into an actionable and theoretically useful framework.

9. Similarly, recent careers research (e.g., Groysberg, Nanda, & Nohria, 2004) found that the performance of “star employees” suffered when they moved to new organizations (and, hence, new teams).