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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628250190 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Project Management Institute |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 92 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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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 stress and team performance?
3. What are the effects of role stress on performance?
4. Do team learning behaviors help teams cope with the challenge of team role stress?
5. Is the leadership style of the team leader correlated with team learning behaviors?
The results of this first phase showed that:
1. Team-level role stress exists as a variable separate from individual role stress and that role stress — particularly role overload — is negatively related to project team performance.
2. Team learning behaviors are negatively related to team role stress and positively related to project team performance.
3. Leadership style influences the extent of team learning behaviors.
4. Team membership stability is positively related to the extent of team learning behaviors.
These findings are shown in Figure 2.1.
In our interpretation, these findings stress the importance of team learning behaviors with respect to team performance. Project managers and their team members indicated team learning behaviors as essential to improving project performance. We also learned that tough deadlines and restricted or fluctuating resource availability caused perceptions of overload, which hindered team member engagement in collective learning behaviors. In addition, the findings, according to our interpretation, indicate that the leader has important influence on stimulating team learning.
Aims of the Present Research Project (Phase II)
The general aim of phase II is to gain more insight into the question of how to increase the occurrence of 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 learning within and between teams.
Different approaches can be taken to conduct such an investigation. These approaches differ, among other things, in the degree to which the investigator influences the conditions surrounding the teams and team leaders. At one extreme, there is the approach taken by the anthropologist who refrains from influencing as much as possible. At the other extreme, there is the approach by the experimental social psychologist who tries to keep these conditions under control as much as possible. Somewhere in between are descriptive longitudinal investigations, descriptive case studies and, finally, action-research case studies. We opted for the action-research case study approach because it allows us to test basic interventions within the natural environments of the teams. In this way, we expected to learn more about the causalities between the various variables. Most of the previous investigations in this area of team learning are either cross-sectional — with very limited opportunities to test for causality — or laboratory experiments, which do not provide insight into the real conditions under which learning takes place (Salas, Cooke, & Rosen, 2008).
In sum, in this study, we strived 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?
Structure of This Report
The first topics we address in this report are team learning behaviors, intervention strategies, and influencing conditions, which are covered in Chapter 3. In this chapter we specifically summarize findings on intervention strategies and influencing conditions we used in our investigation. The concept of team learning is also briefly described. More detailed information on the concept is provided in our report on Phase I (Storm, Savelsbergh, & Kuipers, 2010).
Chapter 4 presents a brief description on our research method. In Chapter 5, we describe each of the two cases of project teams we studied in detail, along with our observations, evaluations, and lessons learned during our presence in the teams.
Chapter 6 pulls it all together with concluding remarks, questions our exploration raised, ideas for further research, and a summary of how practice could profit from our observations.
CHAPTER 3
Team Learning Behaviors, Intervention Strategies, and Influencing Conditions
In phase I of our research, we examined the relationships between team learning, team performance, and role stress. Reviewing literature on team learning, we adopted Edmondson's (1999) rich definition of team learning behaviors, which refers to a continuous process of collective action and reflection. This definition was elaborated on by operationalizing the concept of team learning into eight distinct and concrete learning behaviors: (1) exploring different perspectives, (2) co-construction of meaning, (3) reflection on outcomes, (4) reflection on processes, (5) communicating errors (6) analyzing errors, (7) feedback behavior, and (8) experimentation (Savelsbergh, Van der Heijden, & Poell, 2009).
Examining the relationship between team learning and performance, previous findings (Edmondson, 2002) confirmed that teams vary in team learning and performance and that they are positively related. Obviously, due to their unique non-routine types of challenges, project teams have to learn, and continuously improve their processes, products, and services in ways that reflect changes in the external context in order to succeed. As Söderlund et al. (2008) argue projects are processes of knowledge development and learning. In projects, the extent of task-work processes that don't require interdependent interaction is rather low, and the extent of teamwork processes that require coordination and knowledge exchange to come up with the interdependent components of performance is rather high. Project teams that have learned to learn and adapt as teams appeared to be perceived as better performers.
Because the purpose of this study was to find some answers on how to increase team learning behaviors, we decided to explore the effects of interventions aimed at promoting team learning. Moreover, findings from the first phase raised the hypothesis that certain conditions in and around project teams might be responsible for the differences in learning behaviors and performance of teams. Some of these conditions, such as team member instability and role stress, have already been explored and found to be negatively related to team learning and performance; other conditions require further exploration.
In the following pages, we will highlight assumptions from the literature and our own experience on interventions in teams. Subsequently, we will clarify the conditions to which we gave special attention while observing the effects of our interventions in teams.
Intervention Strategies Promoting Team Learning Behaviors
Previous work suggests that interventions may promote team learning behaviors (Klein et al., 2009; Salas et al., 1999). For example, Blickensderfer, Cannon-Bowers, and Salas (1997) report on training skills relevant to diagnosis, feedback, and planning that help teams to learn and build shared mental models. Additionally, London and Sessa (2007) describe control mechanisms and interventions that may guide groups to interaction patterns that facilitate learning. And, more generally, Kozlowski and Ilgen (2006) in their review show that team training and team building can have positive effects on the functioning and performance of teams.
With regard to the design of our interventions we followed the approach developed by Argyris (1991). On the basis of his extensive research, Argyris concluded that learning in organizations is obstructed by defensive reasoning. While observing that defensive reasoning is a widespread phenomenon, Argyris also believes that "people can break out of the vicious cycle of defensive reasoning ... People can be taught how to recognize the reasoning they use when they design and implement their actions ... They can discover that the kind of reasoning necessary to reduce and overcome organizational defenses is the same kind of tough reasoning that underlies the effective use of ideas in strategy, finance and other management disciplines" (Argyris, 1991, p. 106). To implement this "hard reasoning" Argyris proposes several conditions for successful interventions:
• Use real-life cases instead of theoretical or normative arguments.
• Use hard data and help people to apply these data in their analyses.
• Practice the kind of behavior that is characteristic of double-loop learning (rather than single-loop learning).
• Encourage people to search for concrete feedback on the effects of their new behavior and reasoning.
As it is our purpose in this second research phase to explore the effectiveness of intervention strategies aimed at increasing team learning, we used these propositions to come up with a set of design principles for our own intervention strategy.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Team Learning in Projects: Theory and Practice"
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements,
Chapter 1: Executive Summary,
Chapter 2: Introduction,
Chapter 3: Team Learning Behaviors, Intervention Strategies, and Influencing,
Chapter 4: Research Method,
Chapter 5: Case Descriptions and Findings,
Chapter 6: Conclusions and Discussion,
Conclusions,
Limitations of our Study and Suggestions for Future Research,
Implications for Practice,
Author Contact Details,
References,