Relationship between team learning and team effectiveness

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is two-fold: first, to demonstrate that learning occurs as a collective process in addition to traditional individual learning and second, to identify its antecedents and consequences at the team level.Design/methodology/approachData were gathered using questionnaires answered by 356 participants organized in 90 teams. Quantitative analytic strategies were applied to verify if individual answers of team members were similar enough to compound team scores and to measure the predictive power of the proposed model.FindingsResults showed that team learning is a collective phenomenon: intra-team differences were small and differences between teams were significant. Additional results demonstrated that team learning is predicted by team potency (34%) and, at the group level, explains 5% of the team’s satisfaction.Practical implicationsThe findings of the present research suggest that organizational managers can improve the results of teams by supporting the development of social processes such as potency and learning.Originality/valueLearning in organizations has received close attention in recent years. However, publications are focusing mostly on the individual learning that occurs in teams and organizations. The main contribution of this paper is to demonstrate what characterizes team learning as a collective process and which relations it maintains with other team processes.