An Exploratory Study of Group Development and Team Learning

• Author: Eva Kyndt,Elisabeth Raes,Piet Van den Bossche,Stefan Decuyper,Filip Dochy
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrdq.21201
• Published date: 01 March 2015
• Date: 01 March 2015

HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT QUARTERLY, vol. 26, no. 1, Spring 2015 © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) • DOI: 10.1002/hrdq.21201 5

ARTICLES

An Exploratory Study of Group

Development and Team Learning

Elisabeth Raes, Eva Kyndt, Stefan Decuyper, Piet Van den

Bossche, Filip Dochy

Teams need to pass through a series of development stages before they

can operate effectively, and, in a changing context, it has also been

demonstrated that teams need to continue learning in order to remain

effective. This article aims to explore the relationship between team

development and team learning. In particular, it focuses on when and why

basic team learning processes such as sharing information, co-construction,

and constructive confl ict occur during different phases of development.

It can be hypothesized that although each stage of team development is

characterized by specifi c learning tasks, team learning processes occur more

in certain stages than in others. The results from a model-based cluster

analysis and ANOVA analyses on a sample of 44 professional teams show

that team learning occurs more in the later phases of group development

due to higher levels of team psychological safety and group potency.

Key Words: team learning, group development, group potency,

psychological safety

Introduction

Group development can be defi ned as the maturation of a collection of indi-

viduals into an effective functioning group (Wheelan, 2005). London and

Sessa (2007) stated that due to the importance of team and group work within

organizations, “group development and facilitation are an important part

of human resource development” (p. 353). Another important focus in the

research in this area is on team learning, which is also found to be associ-

ated with effective team functioning (Decuyper, Dochy, & Van den Bossche,

2010). Both team learning and group development research start from the

premise that teams or groups will not be effective unless they collaboratively

learn to overcome barriers such as team dictators (West & Markiewicz, 2004),

6 Raes, Kyndt, Decuyper, Van den Bossche, Dochy

HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT QUARTERLY • DOI: 10.1002/hrdq

free riding (Wagner, 1995), social loafi ng (Karau & Williams, 1993; West,

2004), ego-trippers (Lencioni, 2002), and a lack of team psychological safety

(Edmondson, 1999). However, although both streams of literature have the

same starting point, their focus seems to be different. The team learning lit-

eratures focus on how behaviors such as giving feedback, sharing information,

boundary crossing, team refl exivity, and experimentation affect the construc-

tion of shared mental models and team effectiveness (e.g., De Dreu, 2007;

Edmondson, Bohmer, & Pisano, 2001; Savelsbergh, Storm, & Kuipers, 2008;

Van den Bossche, Gijselaers, Segers, & Kirschner, 2006; Zellmer-Bruhn &

Gibson, 2006). These authors theorize that due to a growing emphasis on

knowledge, a changing environment, and increasing knowledge infl ation, there

is an increasing importance on team learning to predict team effectiveness. The

group development literature similarly addresses the question of how groups

become effective over time in terms of their readiness to exert team-level

processes like team learning behaviors (Tuckman & Jensen, 1977; Wheelan,

2009). However, the difference is that the emphasis in team learning studies

is on examining whether and why certain input variables predict variance in

specifi c team learning processes and outcomes, whereas group development

studies focus on describing how and why groups mature over time.

Despite the different focus of team learning and group development lit-

erature, it is surprising to see that there is virtually no empirical research that

bridges the gap between these two distinct fi elds of research (Decuyper etal.,

2010). After all, boundary-crossing questions such as “To what extent does

group development also serve units to be capable of learning effectively as a

team?” or “How do different development stages relate to team learning behav-

ior?” are gaining importance in the light of an increasing emphasis on knowl-

edge, creativity, and innovation. On this topic, Kasl, Marsick, and Dechant

(1997) suggest that group development does not guarantee collective learning.

They state that “teams can work their way through the developmental stages

of forming, storming, norming and performing (Tuckman, 1965), yet never

challenge dysfunctional assumptions or create new knowledge through strate-

gies such as framing or perspective integration” (1997, p. 231). Therefore, in

addition to research that empirically studies the link between group dynamics

and teamwork, there is also a necessity for empirical research that links group

development to team learning (Ilgen, Hollenbeck, Johnson, & Jundt, 2005).

Noteworthy in this context is the conceptual confusion between team

learning and group development. Even though the terms team and group are

often used interchangeably (Cohen & Bailey, 1997), they can also refer to

something different. Research on team learning is mainly focused on teams

that comply with the defi nition of Cohen and Bailey (1997, p. 242):

A team is a collection of individuals who are interdependent in their tasks,

who share responsibility for outcomes, who see themselves and who are

seen by others as an intact social entity embedded in one or more larger