Team Learning in Projects

Theory and Practice

Chantal Savelsbergh, BSc, MSc, C.Eng, Peter Storm, PhD

• Publisher: Project Management Institute
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781935589501
• eBook ISBN: 9781628250190
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

Enhance Team Performance Through Effective Learning Strategies

How can projects be executed successfully today, and even more effectively tomorrow? Team Learning in Projects: Theory and Practice provides a research-backed exploration of this question. This report reveals the connection between team performance and team learning, offering strategies to boost learning behaviors within project teams.

Discover how to:

• Improve team dynamics and collaboration
• Implement targeted intervention strategies
• Overcome obstacles to joint learning

For project managers, team leaders, and management professionals, this book offers actionable insights to foster a culture of continuous improvement and drive project success.

Chapter 1

Executive Summary

Why Investigate Team Learning?

Teamwork is essential for project success. A project will succeed only if people with different interests, areas of expertise, previous experience, and from different work cultures, can come together and form a smoothly operating team.

Although individual success can be motivating to the person involved, it can also be a factor that limits the ability of a team to strive for joint success. Learning together to be an efficient and effective operating team that aims for joint success rather than individual success is not an easy task. The interdependent components of performance require effective coordination among the performances of multiple individuals. Effective leadership and supportive conditions are required. However, the ultimate effort toward teamwork must be made by the team itself. To become a high-performing team, a project team must learn to learn.

In our view, projects in general have two different but complementary aims: (1) to perform and (2) to learn. The learning aim supports the performance aims of both the current project and future projects. The complementary effect works the other way around, also: Good performance stimulates the desire to become even better and, hence, to discover how to improve. In other words, good performance drives the desire to learn.

Summary of our First Research Phase on Team Learning, Role Stress, and Performance

In our previous research report (Storm, Savelsbergh, & Kuipers, 2010), we presented the results of our first research phase (phase I), which focused on the relationships between team learning behaviors, role stress, and performance. Findings from this study, conducted among real-life project teams, revealed a strong and positive relationship between team performance and team learning, which confirmed the findings of other academics (Edmondson, 2002). Moreover, a person-focused leadership style and a stable team composition appeared to be positively related to the degree of team learning. Additionally, our findings indicated that perceptions of stress, especially that caused by work overload of the team, were negatively related to team learning.

What Did We Investigate in the Second Research Phase?

In our second research phase (phase II), which is the subject of this research report, we explored how to increase team learning behaviors. If we understand more about the conditions—including the behavior of the team leader—that obstruct or stimulate team learning behaviors, we might be able to advise management, team leaders, and teams on how to strive for better performance by improving the learning within and between teams. We aimed to find answers to two central research questions:

1. Is it possible to increase the level of team learning within and among project teams with the aid of time-limited interventions?
2. How do different conditions influence the effectiveness of these interventions?

How Did We Execute the Research?

In contrast with the quantitative survey approach of the first phase, in this phase we used an action-research case study approach because it allowed us to test basic interventions within a natural environment of project teams. In this way we expected to learn more about the causalities between the various variables. We started by designing a basic intervention strategy, using literature on team interventions and using our own observations working with project teams. Moreover, we identified a set of conditions that might influence the extent of team learning, using the literature and results of our previous research phase. We did the research in two stages. In the first stage, we investigated five project teams engaged in one IT program; in the second stage, we investigated six project teams engaged in one infrastructure program; and, in between the stages we reviewed our approach.

What Are the Results?

The purpose of phase II was not to validate but to explore and raise questions on “how team learning could be fostered.” In sum, we conclude that:

• Theoretically, it is easily accepted that joint team learning is needed, but this principle is rarely put into practice.
• Intra-team learning and inter-team learning are interdependent.
• Not only is the principle of joint learning hardly put into practice, it is at times made impossible to be implemented by team leaders and management themselves.
• Interventions that take place in an isolated setting—such as in a training program—can have a positive cognitive effect but are not likely to have a lasting behavioral effect.
• Increased behavioral learning patterns are more likely to occur when there is an immediate and strong need to stop the ongoing actions and investigate the causes of the incident.
• Development of joint team learning follows a cyclical path, consisting of ups-and-downs and a trend.

Additionally, we developed possible answers to the following questions:

• Why are the teams not naturally inclined to increase their involvement in joint learning behaviors?
• What does it take to apply the theoretical notions of team learning in practice?
• What is the influence of time and timing on the development of team learning?
• What role does leadership play in promoting joint team learning?

Finally, we propose the following suggestions for future research:

• Investigate how familiar team learning is to the team members.
• Include the possibility of mutual interdependencies between teams.
• Supplement overall measures of leadership behavior—such as person-oriented leadership style—with more specific indications of how leaders deal with stress and setbacks and how they influence the conditions under which their teams have to perform and learn.
• Investigate the development of team learning over time. If possible, include critical incidents analyses.
• Extend research design to include implementation of crucial theoretical notions in practice.

How Can Project Teams and their Team Leaders Apply These Results?

• Support teams in “learning to learn” by giving them a learning objective—for example, a specific improvement idea—in addition to their performance objective.
• Management and team leaders should be aware that their decisions and actions have both a direct and an indirect influence on the degree of team learning within the project. Their involvement and commitment to promote team learning—for example, through joint simulation of procedures of the project—are of vital importance.
• Moreover, team leaders should be aware of setting an example for their team members.
• Therefore, before starting to work with a whole team, team leaders may need time and coaching in how they can support, rather than direct, their teams in strengthening the collective learning behaviors within the team.

Chapter 2

Introduction

This report describes the approach and results of phase II of our research on learning behavior in project teams. In phase I, we tested our hypotheses on the relationships between team stress, team learning, and team performance. In phase II, we explored the question of how to strengthen team learning in reality.

Outcomes and Questions Resulting from Previous Research Project (Phase I)

The first phase of our research, called “Coping with Stress in Organizational Roles through Team Learning” (Storm, Savelsbergh, & Kuipers, 2010), focused on the concepts of role stress, team learning, and performance in project teams. The central research questions of this first phase were:

1. Does role stress at the team level exist?
2. Which team characteristics correlate with team-level role stre...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Chapter 1: Executive Summary
• Chapter 2: Introduction
• Chapter 3: Team Learning Behaviors, Intervention Strategies, and Influencing Conditions
• Chapter 4: Research Method
• Chapter 5: Case Descriptions and Findings
• Chapter 6: Conclusions and Discussion
• Author Contact Details
• References