Team Learning in Projects: Theory and Practice

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

How can today's project be done well? How can tomorrow's project be done even better? These two classic questions are the foundation for Team Learning in Projects: Theory and Practice, a report of research conducted by Chantal Savelsbergh and Peter Storm. This research follows a previous effort that revealed a strong and positive relationship between team performance and team learning. In this report the researchers drop the second shoe by exploring how to increase team learning behaviors. Their investigation is based on the underlying principle that projects have two goals: to perform and to learn. Learning supports performance of current and future projects; performance stimulates the desire to improve and drives learning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Project Management Institute
• Release date: Mar 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781628250190

Book preview

References

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:

Is it possible to increase the level of team learning within and among project teams with the aid of time-limited interventions?

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