A Strategic View of Team Learning in Organizations

Research in strategic management and organizational behavior has increasingly focused on understanding how organizations achieve and sustain performance in fast-changing environments. Strategy research suggests that senior managers, through their decisions, influence capabilities at the organizational level. Organizational behavior research suggests that teams, through engaging in learning within and across their boundaries, contribute to organizational-level capabilities. Only recently have researchers started to link the two sets of insights, exploring the idea that team learning plays a critical bridging role in how decisions by senior managers translate into organizational performance outcomes. This paper organizes these insights into a model of capability development focused on how different kinds of team learning routines may support organizational capabilities that create competitive advantage. The model introduces a strategic view of team learning, highlighting the ability of senior managers to shape team learning routines effectively as a critical skill because of its role in building organizational capabilities. The authors identify a lack of research in this area and suggest future directions to address it.