Organizations increasingly rely on teams to carry out critical strategies and operational tasks. How do teams learn, and what factors are most important to team learning? This paper reports on current perspectives and findings that address these questions, looking at empirical studies on team learning from three areas of research: outcome improvement, task mastery, and group process. Overall, Edmondson and coauthors characterize the nature of research to date and assemble what is known and unknown about the theoretically and practically important topic of team learning. Key concepts include:
- Team learning has value for organizations; learning in teams is seen as a key mechanism through which learning organizations become strategically and operationally adaptive and responsive.
- Research on team learning is at a crossroads.
- How the learning of individual work teams translates into organizational learning is not well understood, and management literature to date offers few insights.
- One avenue for future research is the durability and utility of team-based networks for the organization as a whole.
- Learning in teams almost necessarily plays a role in developing the knowledge and skills of individuals who compose the team. Another avenue for future research is how individuals benefit from their team learning experiences in terms of intellectual, career, and personal development goals.
- Organizations stand to benefit when ideas are cross-fertilized and diverse individuals learn to work together. "Outsiders" can introduce valuable ideas.
- Learning and execution are often at odds: Learning by its nature involves uncertainty, false starts, and occasional dead ends. Team learning in organizations must be recognized as a strategy for tolerating forays into the unknown.
