When do team members learn from each other? The importance of team members’ expertness, work team identification and need for closure and the moderating effect of team psychological safety.

Abstract

Organisations increasingly rely on teams to get work done. Teams can provide more creative, responsive, productive, efficient, and effective outcomes than individuals working alone. However, the successful use of teams in organisations depends on team members’ ability to utilize their own specialized expertise while integrating the diverse expertise of their colleagues. This can be achieved through team learning. Team learning enables that teams can combine their members’ existing knowledge structures and develop innovative solutions to changing problems. Team learning is a function of the members’ learning, which through their interactions produce mutual understanding that leads to an increase in the collective level of knowledge. By means of learning, team members can gain knowledge on how to structure themselves, communicate with other groups, conduct work processes, make decisions, and put these decisions into action. However, teams do not always learn, as learning can be conditioned by the members’ characteristics, the team emergent states and the members’ interactions while they are working together. By studying the process of learning in teams, this thesis presents three studies that extend our understanding of the antecedents and contextual factors that determine when and from whom team members learn within their team. This thesis therefore contributes to the research on teams and learning in four ways: (1) by studying how members’ expertness, work team identification and need for closure influence team learning; (2) by reviewing learning from a multilevel contingency perspective; (3) by zooming in at the process of learning, that is studying dyadic learning in teams through the use of social network analysis; and, (4) by getting insights of learning as a process that can be studied from a dyadic (longitudinal) perspective. Our findings strengthen the knowledge that organisations have to promote learning in teams, such that they can create more effective policies and practices that enable both the social and the cognitive processes that stimulate the emergence of learning within teams.