FAR Literature Review: Team learning behaviors in virtual engagement teams
When teams are the prime unit of working and learning in organizations - such as is the case in accountancy firms - they face many challenges to use their potential and achieve their goals. Their business environment can be characterized by complexity and ambiguity. This requires teams to engage in team learning behaviros that allow team members to share their skills, knowledge, information, and point of view to modify team's habits and work procedures depending on what is required.
Understanding how team learning behaviors affect virtual engagement teams is the central research question in the FAR project “Virtual Audit Teamwork: working, learning, and delivering high audit quality virtually." The purpose of this literature review is twofold: On the
one hand, the research team aims to provide an overview of available insights on remote work and virtual teamwork in the auditing profession. On the other hand, the team strive to provide an overview of available literature on team learning behaviors in virtual teams to identify drivers and facilitate conditions of team learning in virtual teams. A systematic review of how team learning behaviors are affected by virtual teamwork is still missing, and we know little about how these insights relate to the auditing profession.
Authors
PhD candidate at the Department of Accounting and Information Management (AIM) and the department for Education Research and Design (ERD) at the School of business and Economics, Maastricht University.
Topics of interest include organisational learning culture, team decision-making and audit quality
Ann Vanstraelen is Full Professor of Accounting and Assurance Services at Maastricht University and serves as Head of the department of Accounting and Information Management. She coordinates the multidisciplinary research theme "Culture, Ethics and Leadership". She earned her PhD at the University of Antwerp. Her research interests relate to the broad field of auditing and assurance services, governance, corporate reporting and disclosure, with a specific focus on the quality of accounting and auditing practices.
Wim Gijselaers is full professor in educational research, in the School of Business and Economics at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. His research focuses on educational innovation in higher education, social determinants of team cognition and team performance, and judgment and decision making in management and accounting. His educational development work focused on the further development of Problem-Based Learning within Business Education. Next to teaching in the award-winning Master program Management of Learning, he teaches as visiting professor at the University of Bern (Switzerland) in a post-graduate program for Health Care Professionals. Wim is member of advisory boards of universities in Germany and Switzerland, and serves as chief-editor of the Springer Book Series Innovation and Change in Professional Education. Next, he is affiliated with the consulting firm Learning Miles (based in Helsinki). In this role he has presented workshops for Scandinavian-based companies on topics of Innovation and Change. He was co-founder and chair of the EDINEB network in the Nineties. Next, he was the founding editor of the Springer Book Series Educational Innovation in Economics and Business. He served positions as Program Director of International Business, and Associated Dean of Education. Currently he is chair of the department of Educational Research and Development, at the School of Business and Economics (Maastricht University). Several of his PhD’s received awards for their PhD Thesis, or papers presented at meetings of the American Educational Research Association, the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education, and the EARLI Special Interest Group 14 “Learning and Professional Development”. Together with Professor Ann Vanstraelen he coordinates the GSBE research project "Culture, Ethics, and Leadership": https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/research/institutes/gsbe/gsbe-research.
