Facilitating Team Learning in Organisations

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, as researcher being involved in team learning research differences between results found in quantitative and qualitative research were noticed. Main aims of this chapter was on the one hand to make an inventory of antecedents influencing team learning and on the other hand to see whether there are 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 focusses 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 only can be answered by means of qualitative research.