There is No End to Learning, but How Does it Begin? A Meta-Analysis of the Team Learning Pathway

Abstract

We complete a meta-analytic investigation across two phases to increase understanding about team learning, an important process that is a challenge for teams to enact. In the first phase, we create a meta-analytic database of 198 independent samples (N = 15,536 teams) to summarize the strength of the relationships between learning and team antecedents and outcomes. Motivational emergent states (e.g., potency) exhibited the strongest relationship with learning, followed by affective (e.g., psychological safety) and cognitive (e.g., trust) emergent states. Our results also highlight the positive relationship between learning and various antecedents, including team structure, supportive organizational context, environmental uncertainty, cognitive diversity, and gender diversity. In the second phase, we create an additional meta-analytic database with 53 independent samples (N = 4,468 teams) to test a serial mediation model, demonstrating that psychological safety and learning serially mediate the relationships between team learning orientation and salient team outcomes (i.e., performance and innovation).