Strategic Innovation Management: Group learning and the role of group context in determining the performance of innovative project teams: A theoretical and empirical study

Abstract

The critical role of teams in organizations’ learning and innovation capabilities, coupled with the significant increase in the use of groups in changing contexts, creates an academic and managerial imperative to analytically investigate the nature and the factors that influence the way through which groups learn to successfully execute their tasks (Edmondson, 2002; Wong, 2004; Zellmer-Bruhn & Gibson, 2006). Yet, despite this recognition and the emerging state of group learning literature, our understanding of learning within real organizational groups still remains limited. The present doctoral study, by addressing this research gap, conceptualizes and advances a model of group learning, with three different classes of antecedent conditions (i.e., social, psychological, and enabling factors), and two distinct but related performance consequences (i.e., exploitation of group outcomes by the corresponding organization, and group efficiency). Through the use of Structural Equation Modeling, the results of a field study of 139 innovative project teams of the Greek ICT and Pharmaceutical sectors show that: (1) group learning is comprised of three separate but interrelated processes (i.e., intuition, interpretation, and integration) -based Crossan et al.’s (1999) learning framework-, (2) several group social conditions significantly affect group learning (i.e., conflict is negatively related to group learning, while participative decision-making and boundary-spanning exert positive influences), (3) certain psychological conditions are significantly related to team learning processes (i.e., psychological safety is nonlinearly associated with group learning, whereas cohesion has a positive impact), (4) group learning is also significantly affected by various enabling conditions (i.e., clear goals, team leadership, and members’ previous experience are positively related to group learning), (5) group learning has a direct positive impact on efficiency-based facets of team performance, (6) group learning is positively related to the organizational exploitation of team outcomes (i.e., group learning effectiveness), and (7) team learning mediates the effects of social, psychological and enabling factors on group learning effectiveness. Overall, these findings offer important contributions to a recent research stream of team learning-performance modeling, by supporting an integrative perspective in which group interpersonal and contextual factors shape group learning processes for producing team and organizational-level outcomes.