Abstract
Organizations depend on the learning capabilities of teams in order to be competitive in today’s information-laden business landscape. Hence, it is not surprising that there have been tremendous efforts made to understand team learning within the past two decades. These efforts, however, have produced a cluttered literature-base that overlooks a fundamental aspect of team learning: How do teams learn over time? In this paper, we first synthesize the literature to develop a shared vocabulary to understand team learning dynamics. We then leverage research investigating how teams operate within the context of time (e.g., team development, performance cycles, emergent state development) and combine it with the extant team learning literature in developing an unfolding model of team learning. This comprehensive model addresses a noticeable gap in the extant literature by illustrating how teams learn over time. Finally, we put forth three grand challenges for the future of team learning research.
Highlights
Understanding Team Learning Dynamics Over TimeReviewed by: Vanessa Urch Druskat, University of New Hampshire, United States Joseph Andrew Allen, The University of Utah, United States
Teams are the cornerstone of most organizations today and, it is crucial that researchers and practitioners alike take the time and effort to understand teams better
Starting with Edmondson’s (1999) article, the literature on team learning began to grow and expand – budding off in different directions until the team learning literature landscape was cluttered and confusing. This manuscript is an attempt to integrate the disparate research streams that contribute to our understanding of the dynamic nature of team learning
Summary
Reviewed by: Vanessa Urch Druskat, University of New Hampshire, United States Joseph Andrew Allen, The University of Utah, United States. For team learning to occur, information needs to be shared amongst team members, discussed and scaffolded to existing knowledge, and stored in some way to be retrieved later This process does not happen in a single moment, but in a series of interactions that unfold over time. By viewing team learning through our unfolding model (Figure 1), researchers and practitioners can reveal new insights on how learning develops over time and highlight factors that facilitate team learning and increase performance. These two aims are accomplished as follows. These challenges represent crucial gaps in the collective scientific knowledge state and, if addressed, will help teams learn and perform more effectively in practice
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