2016B03 – Moving audit teams forward – Designing firm environments for sustainable learning from errors

Organizations have a marked interest in fostering team learning to manage performance and innovation. However, practitioners and researchers currently lack coherent knowledge on which drivers are effective at fostering team learning. Along with team learning, we also focus on the emergent states of psychological safety, shared cognition, team potency/efficacy, and cohesion, previously related to team learning. In this meta analysis, we include 50 quantitative studies providing information on 4,778 teams of professionals across manufacturing, product development, academic research and teaching, health care, and professional services. First, we find that team learning correlates positively, if moderately, with four organization-level drivers: top-level leadership, organizational culture, job resources, and organizational infrastructure. Second, two of these drivers also correlate robustly with team emergent states: organizational culture and job resources. These findings provide specific levers and estimates of relative influence to guide managerial practice and future research on team learning.

Organizations wishing to foster learning at the team level can do so effectively through providing teams with resources such as autonomy and enrichment, next to general support of money and time. These resources should be provided in a supportive, learning-driven culture shaped by engaged, supportive leaders that are connected with their teams to create the best possible conditions for teams to engage in continuous learning, either directly or, even more effectively, by enabling teams to develop psychological safety, shared cognition, potency/efficacy, as well as social and task cohesion. Creating this system of conditions for effective team learning requires close alignment of different functions within an organization, bringing leadership and HR together to achieve a shared goal.