Team Learning Behavior Research Articles

The effect of enabling performance measurement systems on team learning behaviour and team effectiveness

Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of the enabling performance measurement systems (PMS) on non-managerial employees’ team learning behaviours (TLB) and team effectiveness (TE) when the PMS is used as an enabler. Design/methodology/approach A questionnaire survey was conducted with non-managerial employees in Japan and a total sample of 474 responses were collected. Partial least squares structural equation modelling using Smart-PLS was used for the analysis. Findings The results demonstrated that the design feature of global transparency in enabling PMS contributes to the enhancement of TE, with partial mediation through TLB. Furthermore, it was also evident that fostering TLB involves increasing the flexibility in PMS, specifically offering multiple options for collecting and aggregating performance information in various formats. Originality/value By examining the effects of the four features of enabling controls on TE and TLB, this study shows which features in an enabling PMS are important in motivating non-managerial employees at the operational level. The study not only fills a gap on the impact of enabling controls on non-managerial employees that has been under-researched but also makes an academic contribution in that it has deepened our understanding of four features that have not yet been fully elucidated.

Transformational Leadership as an Effective Strategy to Improve Team Performance Excellence through Behavioural Integration

Transformational leadership (TL) has become an important research topic in the field of business and management and is demonstrated as an important variable affecting how organizational members interact and function. TL method encourages and motivates employees to create and bring about the change necessary for the future success of the company. Accumulated literatures have evidenced the causal linkage between TL and team performance (TP). However, in spite of growing research on the significance of TL as a key contextual factor that determines innovative behavior, recent studies have not investigated the psychological mechanisms that link TL to employees’ innovative behavior throughout learning orientation thoroughly. Only limited research has disentangled how transformational leaders enhance managers’ teamwork (e.g. behavioral integration). Therefore, this article uses TL as the theoretical foundation and conducts a synthesized review to sort out evidence integrating teams engagement in team learning behaviours in the existing literature. The study suggests that cohesive teams can be developed by leaders who support an environment for learning or promote proactive learning behaviour and the behavioural integration of teams in the workplace. The findings show that TL has a positive moderating effect between external team learning and both TP outcomes. Results obtained also confirm that TL works through support for innovation, which in its turn interacts with climate for excellence. The moderating effect of organizational status was identified as well. In conclusion, the findings offer theoreti-cal and empirical valuable insights into how TL impacts TP through various mediating variables. Overall, our results demonstrate the importance of integrating dispersion and contextual variables into research models, in particular, previous performance and leadership consensus. This paper can be differentiated from past studies, as it thinks over an ensemble of TL style as an essential antecedent of TP and also enhances the knowledge of the researchers and practitioners about the leadership style that upshot to the TP. This will help the managers, researchers, organizational development specialists and employees who are seeking effective ways to support struggling employees in context to their team performance.

Project leader's interactive use of controls, team learning behaviour and IT project performance: the moderating role of process accountability

PurposeThis study aims to understand how project leaders' interactive use of the project management control systems (MCS) impact IT project performance, by examining the mechanisms through which this relationship is enacted.Design/methodology/approachData were collected from a cross-sectional survey of 109 IT project managers working in Canadian and USA-based organizations. A moderated mediation model was analysed by hierarchical component reflective-formative measurement modelling using PLS-SEM.FindingsResults suggest that the leader's interactive use of project MCS is associated with IT project performance, and this relationship is partially mediated by team learning behaviour. In addition, the relationship between the interactive use of project MCS and team learning behaviour is moderated by the organization's emphasis on process accountability, with the effect being stronger under the conditions of higher emphasis on process accountability.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the literature on the use of controls in the IT project-based business environments by explaining how the project leader's style of use of controls influences project team learning behaviour that in turn impacts project performance. Additionally, this study extends the project governance and accountability literature by identifying and empirically examining how the perceptions of project leader's institutionalized organizational accountability arrangements moderate the impact of the interactive use of control systems on team learning behaviour. A methodological contribution of the study is the scale development to measure leader's perceptions about the organization's emphasis on process accountability.

Team behaviors as antecedents for team members' work engagement in interdisciplinary health care teams.

Due to the increasing complexity and diversity of work tasks in teams, teams need team members who are dedicated and energetic, both characteristics attributed to team members' work engagement. Especially in the domain of health care, high demands at work impact professionals' work engagement. Despite teams being the main work unit in this domain, team research on antecedents of work engagement has been neglected. The present study examines the role of team behaviors such as reflection activities in the relationships between demands at work and team members' work engagement. In doing so, the study aims to extend findings on team behaviors by considering cognitive and work-task related team behaviors as well as team behaviors that focus on emotional aspects. Data of 298 team members of 52 interdisciplinary teams of health and social care organizations which provide care and assistance were collected in this cross-sectional survey study. Relationships between team demands at work, team learning behaviors, dealing with emotions in the team and team members' work engagement were estimated in a mediation model using structural equation modeling (SEM). The results indicate that team members' work engagement is positively related to team learning behaviors and dealing with emotions in the team. Cognitive team demands at work such as the complexity of work tasks, were found to relate positively to team members' work engagement, while emotional team demands such as the amount of emotional labor at work had a negative relationship. Team learning behaviors and dealing with emotions in the team were found to mediate the relationship between team demands at work and team members' work engagement. Our results provide insights into the actual behavior of teams in the domain of health care, both on cognitive and emotional aspects, and the capability of team learning behaviors and dealing with emotions in the team to mediate the relationship between team demands at work and team members' work engagement. The findings encourage future researchers and practitioners to address cognitive, emotional and motivational components in team research to provide a better understanding of team conditions, team behavior and team outcomes.

Picking a design, or a design team? The role of reflective practice and team learning in architecture competitions

This paper examines the role of Reflective Practice and Team Learning when architecture teams pitch their proposals in a design competition. Pitching proposals is significant to architects because pitching designs in competitions is one of the ways architects procure jobs. Previous researchers used the principles of Reflective Practice to describe how teams design together. This study adds to those works by using the principles of Reflective Practice to describe how teams communicate their design to clients. Additionally, this case study introduces team learning concepts to describe how clients perceive design teams when pitching their proposal. In 2018, we observed six architecture teams pitch their design in an architecture competition, analysed the documents presented, and interviewed the jury. Results revealed that the winning team demonstrated the most Framing, Moving and Evaluating language in their pitch. They were also perceived to have demonstrated the most team learning behaviours amongst all the competitors.

Using online learner trace data to understand the cohesion of teams in higher education

AbstractBackgroundMaintaining cohesion is critical for teams to achieve shared goals and performance outcomes within a work‐integrated learning (WIL) environment. Cohesion is an emergent state that develops over time, representing the synchrony of different behavioural interactions. Cohesive teams will exhibit such phenomena by their temporal coordination of micro‐level relations.ObjectivesThe primary aim of this study is to examine the cohesion of teams in learning environments using a learning analytics approach.MethodThis study examines teams from higher education who participate in a WIL environment platform working in teams to develop their collaborative problem‐solving skills. Here we show that temporal network motifs can be used as a proxy to measure cohesion.Results and ConclusionsWe illustrate three clusters represented by team learning behaviours and found that each cluster has distinctive interactions with learning resources, performance outcomes, temporal network motif group characteristics and emergence over time using learning analytics.ImplicationsApplying temporal motifs as an analytics‐based measure of cohesion is a starting point for understanding how cohesion develops over time without relying on surveys. We anticipate that the same approaches can be applied in most learning management systems containing trace data of teams and their interactions with learning resources to understand cohesion.

Performance of architectural teams: The role of team learning, reflexivity, boundary crossing and error communication

This paper examines the role of team learning behaviours in the performance of architecture teams. This is significant to architects because most architects work in project teams. Although there is a growing body of research on the behaviours of design teams, this survey is one of the first studies conducted specifically on the learning behaviours of architects working in teams. We conducted a survey with 105 architecture firms in Victoria, Australia to collect perceptions of team learning behaviour and team performance, then interviewed nine architects to explore their team learning practices. Results from the survey demonstrated that team reflexivity, error communication and boundary crossing behaviours were positively associated with team effectiveness and employee satisfaction.

How video games saved me during the pandemic: A gamer's guide to psychological safety

How video games saved me during the pandemic: A gamer's guide to psychological safety

Withdrawal: How shared leadership affects team performance and satisfaction: Examining competitive mediating mechanisms and moderating effects using meta‐analytic structural equation modeling by Jun‐Hui Zhang and Wei Chen

Understanding whether and why shared leadership leads to positive team performance and team satisfaction is of great significance for both scholars and practitioners. Using meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM), the current paper examined a multiple mediation model based on CMA 3.0 and Mplus 8.3 statistical software to provide new insights. Covering 513 independent effect sizes from 334 empirical papers (350 independent studies, N=25,700 group samples), this paper provides support for the mediating effects of team confidence, team trust and team learning behavior in connecting shared leadership with positive team performance and team satisfaction. Notably, while team confidence and team learning behavior better explain why shared leadership affects team performance, team trust tends to account more for the positive shared leadership--team satisfaction link. Moreover, the results of moderation analyses show that in-group collectivism and power distance positively as well as long-term orientation negatively moderate the shared leadership--team performance link. The findings of this study reveal a comprehensive mediating process of the impact of shared leadership on team performance and team satisfaction, identify the primary mediational mechanisms involved in these relationships, and provide additional explanations (i.e., national cultures) for the heterogeneity among different shared leadership--team performance relationships. We discussed the implications of our findings and pointed out several directions for future research.

Internal fights over resources: The effect of power struggles on team innovation.

Power hierarchy is a recently growing topic among scholars. Although the previous literature has emphasized the importance of understanding power hierarchy in teams and demonstrated the negative consequences of power struggles among team members in team performance, it neglected to explore how power struggles impact other team functioning and outcomes. Drawing on social information processing theory and the team learning behavior model discussed, this study proposes that power struggles send aggressive social information to team members, and such social information negatively influences team learning. Social information emitted by power struggles undermines psychological safety and creates hostility and interpersonal tensions, which reduce team members' providing new ideas and information sharing. In addition, this study proposes a positive relationship between team learning and team innovation since team learning provides two key conditions (i.e., active knowledge integration and appropriate team climate) for successful team innovation. Lastly, this study suggests the mediating role of team learning between power struggles and team innovation. Using a sample of 99 teams from two organizations in Korea, this study tested the proposed model. In sum, this study found that (1) power struggles are negatively related to team learning, (2) team learning is positively related to team innovation, and (3) team learning mediates the relationship between power struggles and team learning.

Dynamics of Team Learning Behaviours: The Effect of Time and Team Culture.

This research study focused on team learning behaviours, particularly the extent to which teams use learning behaviours over time, as well as the influence of different team cultures on learning behaviours over time. Data from 33 university project teams were collected longitudinally at three moments (beginning, halfway point, and end of the project) and the analysis was conducted through growth modelling. A linear relationship between time and team learning through experimenting behaviour was found, suggesting that experimenting behaviour tends to increase over time in project teams. Moreover, the early development of team cultures that promote mutual understanding and good interpersonal relationships, the accomplishment of objectives, flexibility, and the search for alternative ways to perform tasks/problem solving are conducive to experimenting behaviours from the beginning of the teamwork. This study highlights the relevance of the temporal dynamics of team learning behaviours and their interaction with team culture.

Is Intra-Team Political Behavior a Good Thing? It May Depend on Team Learning

Political behavior has been discussed for nearly a hundred years. Although political behavior has been explored in-depth in previous research, sufficient attention has not been paid to team-level politics. Moreover, whether political behavior is beneficial in a team context remains an unanswered question. This paper examines the influence of intra-team political behavior on individual task performance and voice. Based on transactive memory theory, this study explores the potential boundary role of team learning in the above relationship. Furthermore, the authors propose that intra-team competitive climate and leader-member exchange mediate the moderating effect of team learning. A multi-source field study was conducted to examine the hypotheses. Results showed that team learning moderated the relationship between intra-team political behavior and individual task performance, voice, and leader-member exchange. Furthermore, the interactive effect between team learning and intra-team political behavior on task performance was mediated by intra-team competitive climate. Finally, the results of this study provide a basis for critical thinking for organizations and managers seeking to develop their understanding of organizational politics.

How shared leadership affects team performance: examining sequential mediation model using MASEM

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to reveal a sequential mediating process of the impact of shared leadership on team performance by studying the sequential mediating effect of team trust and team learning behavior.Design/methodology/approachThis study develops and examines a sequential mediation model using the meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) method. The sample adopted consists of 347 independent effect sizes extracted from 280 empirical papers (288 independent studies, N = 21,888 groups).FindingsThe results indicate that team trust and team learning behavior play a sequential mediating effect in the shared leadership–team performance relationship.Practical implicationsThe findings suggest that practitioners should share leadership functions and responsibilities among talented team members. Furthermore, practitioners should strengthen the emotional interaction among team members and give positive feedback to the team's intensive learning behaviors.Originality/valueBy identifying the sequential mediating effect of team trust and team learning behavior, this study not only advances the understandings of a comprehensive mediating process through which shared leadership enhances team performance, but also offers new insights into the interrelationship of different types of mediating mechanisms (i.e. team emergent state and team process) in the shared leadership–team performance relationship.

Fostering egalitarianism for team learning in professional service teams

Purpose The purpose of this study is to explore what contributes to egalitarian teams and facilitates for team learning in professional service teams. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative case study, including 41 in-depth interviews (n = 18) of professional service team members and managers in one of Nordics largest professional service companies was conducted. Findings This study reveals how acknowledgement of generational differences and humour can facilitate egalitarianism and psychological safety for members of professional service teams. This in turn relates to team learning processes and behaviours. Humour creates a “safe space” between team members representing different areas of the novice–expert continuum for idea generation and knowledge sharing. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to contribute with insight on experiences and expectations of humour as an enabling mechanism for egalitarianism and team learning in professional service teams. The findings provide professional service firms with valuable and tangible insights, which could serve as a basis for designing learning and training practices.

Learn in Order to Innovate: An Exploration of Individual and Team Learning as Antecedents of Innovative Work Behaviours in Ghanaian Technical Universities

Ghanaian higher education is continuously transforming, and teachers are constantly encouraged to innovate and change. We test a mediated-moderation model that assesses interplays among individual learning (IL), team learning (TL), gender, and innovative work behaviours (IWB) in a sample of 487 lecturers from six technical universities in Ghana. Results suggest that team learning mediates the influence of individual learning on IWB, and gender moderates the remaining direct association between individual learning and IWB such that individual learning appears conducive to IWB among men but not women. This study encourages focusing on team learning to drive knowledge-sharing within and across faculties to generate sustainable innovative outcomes, and it points to ways in which higher education managers and human resources practitioners can invest in human resources to enhance IWB and, subsequently, performance in higher education.

Teaching of AETCOM modules in Physiology using Peer assisted learning: Feasibility assessment study

Introduction and Background: Attitude Ethics and communication (AETCOM) teaching learning methodology needs to be innovative, informal and realistic. Internalization and actualization is important for having a long term impact on their interactions with patients, relatives as well as professional interactions with colleagues. Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) is an effective teaching and learning tool used extensively for various curricular components in medical education worldwide. Objective: the purpose of study was to find feasibility of use of PAL as teaching and learning modality to administer AETCOM module in Physiology. Method: After approval from IEC, in this study first year MBBS students practiced peer assisted learning for AETCOM module in Physiology by 5 peer tutors and 45 peer tutees. Teachers role was to facilitate the PAL methodology learning and preparing the Peer tutors for smooth conduct of PAL sessions. Study participants were evaluated using pre-validated five point Likert scale, structured short answer questions for PAL and AETCOM based case scenario and feedback questionnaire. Results: 42 MBBS students participated in the study. It was observed that peer tutees perceived PAL as interesting and innovative method for teaching and learning AETCOM module in Physiology. Open ended assessment showed that they had achieved desired score about understanding of the AETCOM module and PAL methodology. The feedback from facilitators also echoed the same with improvement in team learning behaviour and use of PAL technique not only for AETCOM but also for learning other curricular topics. Conclusion: PAL can be used as novel teaching learning tool for AETCOM module in Physiology.

Innovation in Teams: The Role of Psychological Capital and Team Learning

The main purpose of the present research was to analyze the relationship between team psychological capital and innovation, considering team learning as a mediating variable. A field survey was carried out, which included 124 work teams belonging to organizations from different sectors of activity. Hypotheses were tested through PROCESS. Results supported a direct positive relationship between team psychological capital and team innovation and an indirect influence of team psychological capital on team innovation, through team learning. The findings of this study highlight the role of team learning as an intervening process between team psychological capital and team innovation. Accordingly, managers should seek to develop team psychological capital and learning behaviors among their teams to promote innovation.

‘Entanglement’ – A new dynamic metric to measure team flow

We introduce “entanglement”, a novel metric to measure how synchronized communication between team members is. This measure calculates the Euclidean distance among team members’ social network metrics timeseries. We validate the metric with four case studies. The first case study uses entanglement of 11 medical innovation teams to predict team performance and learning behavior. The second case looks at the e-mail communication of 113 senior executives of an international services firm, predicting employee turnover through lack of entanglement of an employee. The third case analyzes the individual employee performance of 81 managers. The fourth case study predicts performance of 13 customer-dedicated teams at a big international company by comparing entanglement in the e-mail interactions with satisfaction of their customers measured through Net Promoter Score (NPS). While we can only speculate about what is causing the entanglement effect, we find that it is a new and versatile indicator for the analysis of employees’ communication, analyzing the hitherto underused temporal dimension of online social networks which could be used as a powerful predictor of employee and team performance, employee turnover, and customer satisfaction.

The Interactive Use of Management Control Systems and Information Technology Project Performance: A Conceptual Framework*

ABSTRACTThe objective of this review is to examine how the interactive use of project‐level management control systems (PMCS) impacts information technology (IT) project performance. To answer this research question, we focus on the mechanisms of team learning behavior, expertise integration, and the notion of the project manager's stakeholder analysis efficacy to develop a conceptual framework that explains the relationship between the interactive use of PMCS and IT project performance. The contextual influence of an organization's emphasis on process accountability is also considered. The conceptual framework is based on the theoretical underpinnings of organizational information processing theory, organizational learning theory, and the knowledge‐based view of the firm.

Procedural Justice and Team Learning: Integrated Understanding Based on Social Exchange Theory

The learning that occurs in teams is seen as crucial for organizations to survive and thrive in dynamic environment. Although team procedural justice has been found to impact team learning behavior, it is not clear how and when it is able to do so. Intrateam trust and team leadership have been considered to be important antecedents likewise. However, these factors are examined independently of each other, causing the lack of coherent knowledge on existing work of team learning. In this study, we use social exchange theory to integrate insights across studies on procedural justice, intrateam trust, and leader-member exchange (LMX) differentiation. The time-lagged, survey-based findings reveal that the positive relationship between procedural justice and team learning is mediated by intrateam trust. Yet, this is only true when LMD differentiation is weak, not when it is strong. We therefore provide initial patterns of interaction and discrimination among key factors that are related to team learning in ways that contribute to both theory and practice.