TEAMS

TEAM/GROUP LEARNING

Team

Mathieu, Maynard, Rapp, & Gilson (2008) utilized Kozlowski and Bell’s (2003) definition:

Collectives who exist to perform organizationally relevant tasks, share one or more common goals, interact socially, exhibit task interdependencies, maintain and manage boundaries, and are embedded in an organizational context that sets boundaries, constrains the team, and influences exchanges with other units in the broader entity. (p. 411)

Teamwork

“Teamwork describes how they [team members] are doing it with each other” (Marks, Mathieu, & Zaccaro, 2001, p. 357).

Taskwork

“A teams interactions with tasks, tools, machines, and systems (Bowers, Braun, & Morgan, 1997: 90)”, (as cited in Marks, Mathieu, & Zaccaro, 2001, p. 357).

“Taskwork represents what it is that teams are doing” (Marks, Mathieu, & Zaccaro, 2001, p. 357).

Team Effectiveness

“Largely a function of interaction processes and emergent states (Kozlowski & Ilgen, 2006; Marks, Mathieu, & Zaccaro, 2001); both are considered mechanisms linking inputs such as leadership, training, and composition to valued team outcomes (Mathieu et al., 2008)” (as cited in DeChurch & Mesmer-Magnus, 2010, p. 33).

Team Interdependence

Refers to the “extent to which team members cooperate and work interactively to complete tasks” (Stewart & Barrick, 2000, p. 137).

Team Mental Models

Refers to an organized understanding of relevant knowledge that is shared by team members.  Team members’ shared, organized understanding and mental representation of knowledge about key elements of the team’s relevant environment.

Team Performance

An objective or subjective judgment of how well a team meets valued objectives.

Team Processes

Describes the nature of team member interaction.

“Mediating mechanisms linking such variables as member, team, and organizational characteristics with such criteria as performance quality and quantity, as well as members’ reactions” (Marks, Mathieu, & Zaccaro, 2001, p. 356).

“We define team process as members’ interdependent acts that convert inputs to outcomes through cognitive, verbal, and behavioral activities directed toward organizing taskwork to achieve collective goals” (Marks, Mathieu, & Zaccaro, 2001, p. 357).

Team Self-leadership

“The extent to which teams have the freedom and authority to lead themselves independent of external supervision” (Stewart & Barrick, 2000, p. 139).

Team Self-correction

Consideration of corrective feedback and group reflection as critical team learning behaviors, team self-correction has been identified as an important contributor of team mental models.  Specifically, team self-correction refers to the natural tendency of a team to debrief following a performance event by correcting team attitudes, behaviors, and cognition.

Team Types

Most taxonomies of team type distinguish team tasks that are largely informational from those with high behavioral components.

• Decision-Making Teams:  Teams whose tasks involve processing information and making decisions (e.g., those who do knowledge work).
• Action Teams:  Teams performing time-sensitive tasks requiring members to coordinate actions and perform physical tasks.
• Project Team:  Teams involved in both informational-knowledge work and behavioral action.

References

DeChurch, L. A. & Mesmer-Magnus, J. R. (2010).  The cognitive underpinnings of effective teamwork:  A meta-analysis.  Journal of Applied Psychology, 95 (1), 32-53.  doi: 1037/a0017328

Marks, M. A., Mathieu, J. E., & Zaccaro, S. J. (2001). A temporally based framework and taxonomy of team processes. The Academy of Management Review, 26, 356-376. doi:10.5465/AMR.2001.4845785

Mohammed, S. & Dumville, B. C. (2001).  Team mental models in a team knowledge framework: expanding theory and measurement across disciplinary boundaries.  Journal of Organizational Behavior, 22, 89-106. doi:10.1002/job.86 

Stewart, G. L., & Barrick, M. (2000). Team structure and performance: Assessing the mediating role of intrateam process and the moderating role of task type. Academy of Management Journal, 43, 135-148. doi:10.2307/1556372

Adaptive Learning  

Reacting almost automatically to stimuli to make changes in process and outcome as a coping mechanism.

• Facilitating Adaptive Learning:  To encourage adaptive learning, group leaders or facilitators need to focus on stimuli, encourage group identification, provide resources, and give feedback.

1. They must provide or direct attention toward strong stimuli for change.
2. Encourage members to identify with the group.
3. The leader must provide support and resources to make necessary changes.
4. The leader needs to provide regular feedback to the group on task processes and outcomes.

• Learning Outcomes:
• Reducing / eliminating external pressures
• Maintaining homeostasis and constancy within a changing environment
• Instituting changes in group operations, structure, etc., in response to changes in the environment or to feedback.

Generative Learning  

Proactively learning and applying new skills, knowledge, behaviors, and interaction patterns to improve the group’s performance.

• Generative Learning entails:
• A mastery learning orientation;
• Self-efficacy derived from learning from others;
• Andragogy (adults who are ready to learn and are responsible for their own learning).
• Facilitating Generative Learning:  Leaders and facilitators can stimulate generative learning by leading the group through a mission- and strategy-setting process similar to that undertaken by top management groups.
• Help groups open their boundaries
• Understand their developmental stage
• Enhance their meta-systems perspective

• Processes for supporting generative learning
• Helping members locate resources
• Identify best practices
• Survey the competition
• Provide the group with training in new methods and the chance to try new approaches
• Capturing generative learning
• Helping members reflect on the learning process
• Reflect on ways to evaluate change
• Reflect on how to codify changed business practices
• Assess efficiency of group operations
• Learning Outcomes:
• Instituting new procedures to meet current and future contingencies
• Incorporating new skills, behaviors, and knowledge into group practices

Group Learning

• Viewed as an aggregate of individual learning: 
• Group learning occurs when individual group members create, acquire, and share unique knowledge and information.
• Viewed as a process:
• A process for effecting change in interactions as members acquire, share, and combine knowledge; test assumptions; discuss differences openly; form new routines; and adjust strategies in response to errors.
• Views the group as a system:
• A dynamic system in which learning processes, the conditions that support them, the individuals in the group, and the group behaviors change as the group learns.
• Viewed as a cycle of activities:
• Group learning has been viewed as a cycle of activities including reflective communication, experimentation, and knowledge codification.

Group Continuous Learning (a process and systems view)

• A deepening and broadening of the group’s capabilities in 
1. (re)structuring to meet changing conditions;
2. adding and using new skills, knowledge, and behaviors; and
3. becoming an increasingly sophisticated system through reflection of its own actions and consequences.

Readiness to Learn

How a group comes to recognize that stimuli for learning are occurring and that the group needs to change, learn something in order to accomplish its work, and to actually make a decision to take action.  

Transformative Learning

Re-creating or altering the group’s purpose, goals, and-or structure or in other ways changing the core nature of the group.

• Facilitating Transformative Learning: Transformative learning methods include holding practice sessions, designing experiments, and comparing the outcomes of old and new practices.
• Leaders can give the group time to practice new routines, be a role model for new behaviors, evaluate their effectiveness, and improve.
• Unfreeze the group and bring in needed talents, positive attitudes, and fresh perspectives.
• Leaders and facilitators can encourage transformative learning by
• Defining change initiatives as transformational,
• Encouraging critical reflection,
• Helping to assess the current group culture and determine what elements must change to align with a new strategic direction, and
• Encouraging discussion about what it means to respect and value a diversity of disciplines and perspectives.
• Learning Outcomes:
• Introducing wholly new behaviors and outcomes
• Adopting new goals
• Creating new products or services
• Going after new markets
• Forming new alliances

References

London, M. & Sessa, V. I. (2007).  How groups learn, Continuously.  Human Resource Management, Winter, 46, 651-669.  Doi: 10.1002/hrm.20186

Salas, E., Benishek, L., Coultas, C., Dietz, A., Grossman, R., Lazzara, E., & Oglesby, J. (2015). Team training essentials: A research-based guide. Routledge. 

Information Sharing

Examines information pooling behaviors in groups.  In principle, groups are capable of producing better decisions by pooling information.  In practice, however, collective sampling dynamics promote the rehashing of shared information at the expense of pooling unshared information.  Group discussion is biased in favor of shared information, as shared information is more likely to enter discussion than unshared information.  Shared information is held by all group members before discussion begins, whereas unshared information is only held by one group member prior to discussion.

Psychological Safety

Shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking – contributes to team learning behaviors such as seeking feedback, sharing information, experimenting, asking for help, and talking about errors.

Teams – General/Miscellaneous

Group Learning  

Group learning is defined in terms of both processes and outcomes of group interaction.  Emphasizing processes, learning is conceptualized as an ongoing process of reflection and action, characterized by asking questions, seeking feedback, experimenting, reflecting on results, and discussing errors.  As an outcome, group learning refers to relatively permanent changes in the knowledge and performance of an interdependent set of individuals associated with experience.

Realized Consensus

The level of similarity among team member’s individual belief structures.

Realized Coverage

The range of belief structures voiced during a discussion.