Antecedents of Team Learning Distilled from Both Qualitative and Quantitative Research

Teams in organizations are increasingly seen as an important level and leverage for innovation and change, because they can help to let individual ideas develop into new institutional practices and support the cascading of new developments into the organization. This, in turn, can lead to the necessary innovation and change. However, why do some teams perform really well and others not? A trustworthy predicting variable of team performance is team learning. A vast amount of research has been done on this topic. However, in team learning research various differences between results were observed. The main aim of this chapter is to make an inventory of antecedents influencing team learning, and to analyze the differences between results found in quantitative and qualitative studies. Results show that many antecedents could be identified, based on both quantitative and qualitative research. And as expected there are significant differences between both strands of research. Whereas quantitative research mainly focuses on testing hypotheses of antecedents influencing team learning, qualitative research tries to unravel mechanisms on how these antecedents work and how team learning processes are influenced. Majority of the research belongs to the quantitative strand, whereas there are major questions open that can only be answered by means of qualitative research.