Team Learning: Overview

“Teams are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations.” — Decuyper et al. (2010, p. 112); Senge (2006)

What Is Team Learning?

Team learning is one of the most richly studied and most definitionally contested constructs in team science. Over 30 distinct definitions appear in the literature (Decuyper et al., 2010), reflecting both the construct’s importance and the difficulty of capturing a phenomenon that operates simultaneously at the individual, team, and organizational levels.

Despite this variety, a set of core elements recurs consistently across definitions: knowledge acquisition, sharing, combination, and application; monitoring of team processes and goal achievement; experimentation and exploration; seeking and providing feedback; collective reflection on actions, results, and errors; adaptation to internal and external changes; continuous improvement of team processes and outcomes; and shared outcomes among team members (Turner et al., 2020).

Team learning is fundamentally more than the sum of individual learning. It requires team members to develop similar, accurate knowledge structures while working together — building distributed cognitions represented by shared cognitive structures.

“A group of accomplished individual learners does not make a learning team.” — Senge (2006, p. 240)

Senge’s reminder cuts to the heart of what makes team learning distinct: learning teams learn how to learn together.