Facilitators and consequences of team learning: notes for future investigations

Abstract

The learning has been highlighted as one of the main pillars of the organization (Senge, 1990) and especially in the present time of uncertainty and change. As Alcover and Gil (2002) affirm, the ‘capacity to learn more, and make it more quickly than the other organizations becomes the main, and perhaps only sustainable competitive advantage, and therefore the reason for subsistence’. The learning takes place at various levels; in addition to the individual learning, it is essential the collective learning, both organizational, and team. In relation to the learning of teams, researchers have focused on analyze, on the basis of the pioneering work of Edmondson (1999), first in what concerns the main factors that influence such learning and secondly the influence of the same in the results of the teams. This article has a dual purpose. First, to synthesize and integrate the definitions of team learning, understood that as a process and as a result. Second, to analyze the main background and outcoming variables of the current research on team learning.