Analysis Of Teams, Team Learning, And Organizational Behavior

This chapter reviews the retrieved literature about teams, team learning, and organisational behaviour modification respectively to generate an overview of relevant information, theories and concepts to form the foundation on which to base the analysis and the research design in the next chapters.

3.1 Teams

Nowadays, for modern organisations, it is ubiquitous and inevitable to make use of teams (Raes et al., 2016) as to build on the potential of teamwork. Teams have become the building blocks of organisations and form the primary architecture of organisational structure to carry out critical strategic and operational tasks (Bell et al., 2012). “A team is more than a group of people in the same space, physical or virtual” (Van den Bossche et

In continuously changing environments, “it may be that a team’s ability to develop and learn may be most critical for high performance” (Hall, 2007, p. 422; Raes et al., 2015a, p. 3). Team learning is one of the dynamic processes that takes place within teams (Raes et al., 2016). Through team learning, teams can develop their performance capabilities, create new knowledge between team members and with others external to the team, adapt to changes in the environment, and renew and sustain their performance over time (Bell et al., 2012). Team learning behaviours enable collective building of knowledge and skills, leading to improved performance within the team, which is translated into organisational performance (Kayes and Burnett, 2006). Almost three decades ago, Senge already stated in his book ‘The fifth discipline’ that “team learning is vital because teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern organisation. This is where the rubber meets the road; unless teams can learn, the organization cannot learn.” (1990a, p. 10, Decuyper et al., 2010, p. 112). Team learning has a positive influence on diverse aspects and levels of organisational functioning. Team learning enhances individual learning, self-efficacy and motivation (Johnson and Johnson, 1994; Raes et al., 2015a), team effectiveness, organisational learning and innovation (Decuyper et al., 2010), and hence continuous growth of the organisation, making it an important topic to