Investigating Team Learning in a Military Context

As teams have become fundamental parts of today’s organisations, the need for these teams to function and learn efficiently and effectively is widely emphasised. Also in military contexts team learning is vital. The current article examines team learning behaviour in military teams as it aims to cross-validate a team learning model that was originally developed and tested in an educational context. This team learning model includes several socio-cognitive factors that precede, constitute, and result from team learning behaviour. Findings based on path analyses indicate that psychological safety, social cohesion and group potency are positively related to team learning behaviour in military teams. In addition, team learning behaviour does not only foster the construction of mutually shared cognition and transactive memory systems, but also relates positively to the effectiveness of military teams.     

Collaborative learning processes in the context of a public health professional development program: a case study

The health promotion laboratory (HPL – Canada) is a public health professional development program building on a collaborative learning approach in order to support long-term practice change in local health services teams. This study aims to analyse the collaborative learning processes of two teams involved in the program during the first year of implementation. Based on a multiple case study design involving observations, interviews, and documentary sources, the study: (1) describes the learning process by which each team built a common understanding of the problem at hand and developed an intervention to address it; (2) identifies factors that facilitated or hindered these processes; and (3) proposes a cross-case explanation of the collaborative learning process in the HPL. The results demonstrate that the two teams learned by expanding their repertoire of actions, albeit experiencing different processes. Results point to the central role of shared mental models and key influencing factors, such as commitment and participation (team cohesion), team climate (psychological safety), and leadership style. Unlike previous studies on team learning that concentrated on existing teams in organisations, the current research studied purposely created teams working at transforming their practices and showed that they can successfully learn if specific conditions are achieved.     

Building high-performance teams through action learning

Team psychological safety is critical to team learning. When a team feels safe to talk about difficult issues and each team member feels comfortable to express feelings and ideas, the team continuously learns and improves its performance. Amy Edmondson identified team psychological safety in 1999 as a key to high-performance teams, and Google confirmed this in an internal research project in 2015. A lot has been written about team psychological safety, but very few research or experiences demonstrate how to increase the level of psychological safety in a team. The author has measured psychological safety in a team before and after a series of action learning sessions. The results are very encouraging: action learning increases the average level of psychological safety in the team and reduces the dispersion in team members’ evaluation of team psychological safety. A test was made to verify if the mere dynamic of team members participating in a facilitated workshop would have the same impact on the level of psychological safety, but this was not the case. It can therefore be concluded that action learning has a significant impact on team psychological safety and helps a team move toward high-performance.     

Leadership for team learning: the case of university teacher teams

Teacher team involvement is considered a key factor in achieving sustainable innovation in higher education. This requires engaging in team learning behaviors that should result in new knowledge and solutions. However, university teachers are not used to discussing their work practices with one another and tend to neglect any innovation in their tasks. Team leadership behavior is often considered essential for stimulating team learning behavior, but it is unclear how this transpires. Therefore, the present study explores university teacher team members’ perceptions of team learning behavior, their assigned task, and leadership behaviors in their team. Interviews were conducted with 16 members of different teacher teams at a university of applied sciences. Findings included that the vast majority of the team learning behaviors only involved sharing ideas; engaging in constructive conflicts and co-constructions was not observed. Only a few teams combined all three team learning behaviors. In these teams, members observed that existing methods and solutions were no longer adequate, with leaders appearing to combine transformational and transactional behaviors, but operating from a distance without actively interfering in the process. Furthermore, these team members shared leadership behaviors while focusing on the team as a whole, instead of solving problems at individual level. This strongly indicates that task perception and specific vertical and shared team leadership behaviors play a role in stimulating teachers in seeking controversy and co-constructing new knowledge.     

The [un]spoken challenges of administrator collaboration: An exploration of one district leadership team’s use of protocols to promote reflection and shared theories of action

This article explores the use of protocol-structured dialogue in promoting reflective practices and shared theories of action within a district leadership team. Protocols have been used to make individuals’ theories of action visible and subject to evaluation. This is important for leaders trying to establish coherence across a system; in order to establish coherence, individuals on leadership teams need to be able to surface, test, and sharpen and align their internal pictures of how change works. The author draws on qualitative data from a year-long study of one team as it prepared to implement a capacity-building initiative that would promote collaboration and reflection in schools across the district. Findings illustrate how, as administrators experimented with reflective practice using protocols, divergent theories of leadership’s role in setting a clear direction for school-based reflection emerged, with principals looking for district-wide goals to drive school-based reflection and the superintendent looking to leave decisions about goals to individual school leaders. Our findings suggest that the team’s capacity for aligning these theories was limited because protocol-structured dialogue was carried out as a generic problem-solving exercise. As such, it did not promote visible, productive reasoning in the system’s formal leader, the district superintendent. Moreover, protocol-structured discussion did not mediate the problematic effects of formal authority distinctions or longstanding relationships within the administrative leadership team.     

Team learning in teacher teams: team entitativity as a bridge between teams-in-theory and teams-in-practice

This study aimed to investigate team learning in the context of teacher teams in higher vocational education. As teacher teams often do not meet all criteria included in theoretical team definitions, the construct team entitativity was introduced. Defined as the degree to which a group of individuals possesses the quality of being a team, this makes it possible to extend team learning research from strict teams-in-theory to various types of teams-in-practice, including teacher teams. The team learning beliefs and behaviours model, including team entitativity, was applied to teacher teams, assessing whether it still stands in these non-strict teams. Data were collected from 105 teams and analysed using multilevel analysis. Results showed that team entitativity, psychological safety and group potency were related to the occurrence of team learning. The latter appeared to be significantly related to team effectiveness, and the formation of mutually shared cognition was found to be a mediating variable in this relationship.     

Factors affecting university teaching team effectiveness in detached working environments

This paper presents the outcomes of a study of the factors that contribute to teaching team effectiveness in situations where team members rarely meet face to face. Academic faculty within a university Business School were asked to report the degrees to which they believed that the module teaching teams to which they belonged contained members who (1) were satisfied and committed, and (2) regarded their teams as cohesive and as engaging in reliable and useful internal communications. All the teams covered by the study operated in ‘detached’ manners. Team members’ perceptions of the presence within their teams of trust, shared understanding, disparate educational orientations among participants and certain leadership styles were also examined. A model of the determinants of detached team effectiveness was constructed and tested. The respondents’ opinions vis-à-vis levels of satisfaction, commitment, cohesion and the value of internal team communications were then compared with metrics concerning student satisfaction and rates of progression on specific modules. Trust, shared understanding, differences in educational orientation among team members, conflict and the frequency of (though not the length of time spent on) communications emerged as major influences on perceptions of team effectiveness. Teams that were regarded as operating effectively appeared to be associated with higher student satisfaction and progression ratings.     

高职院校疫情防控期间心理服务机制探究--以青海某高职院校为例

面对重大社会突发事件时,高职院校师生会产生应激、焦虑、紧张、抑郁等心理反应。在新型冠状病毒肺炎疫情防控期间,高职院校不仅需要考虑师生的人身安全,也要重视为师生提供心理支持服务,积极采取干预措施,尽量减少疫情带来的心理不良反应,消除心理危机。以此为背景,以青海某高职院校为例,梳理该校心理服务团队制度保障、组织领导、在线服务、助力社会四方面情况,探讨在此期间如何加强高职院校的心理防护和心理危机干预工作机制,旨在为后续的研究和实践提供参考。     

Complex positioning: teachers as agents of curricular and pedagogical reform

We analyse two narratives of teacher‐facilitator teams producing elementary science curricula and disseminating them to their peers. We draw on these stories to interpret how teacher‐facilitators position themselves with respect to other educators (e.g. peer teachers and development‐team members), to real and imagined students and parents, to knowing and learning science, and to pedagogical practices and texts. We read these acts of positioning relationally and responsively. Teacher‐facilitators position themselves and their work in highly complex ways to multiple political and social others. These multiple positions raise a range of anxieties and questions for the teacher‐facilitators and shape their curricular and leadership roles. Our purpose is, first, to tease out these complexities of positioning and subjectivity, and second, to consider how teachers construct their roles as pedagogical and curricular leaders among their peers. This analysis illuminates thinking about how reform is enacted in schools and how leadership roles are constructed.     

Multiple-Group Analysis for Structural Equation Modeling With Dependent Samples

Multigroup structural equation modeling (SEM) plays a key role in studying measurement invariance and in group comparison. However, existing methods for multigroup SEM assume that different samples are independent. This article develops a method for multigroup SEM with correlated samples. Parallel to that for independent samples, the focus here is on the cross-group stability of the within-group structure and parameters. In particular, the method does not require the specification of any between-group relationship. Rescaled and adjusted statistics as well as sandwich-type covariance matrices make the developed method work for possibly nonnormal variables with finite 4th-order moments. The method is applied to a longitudinal data set on the development of entrepreneurial teams across 4 phases. Detailed analysis is provided regarding the stability of the effect of psychological compatibility on team performance, as it is mediated by fairness perception and team cohesion.     

Exploring game experiences and game leadership in massively multiplayer online role‐playing games

This study explored the in‐game experiences of massively multiplayer online role‐playing game (MMORPG) players focusing on game leadership and offline leadership. MMORPGs have enormous potential to provide gameplayers with rich social experiences through various interactions along with social activities such as joining a game community, team play and others. In this study, a total of 808 Korean online gameplayers participated in an online survey. Amongst them, 300 MMORPG players were used as the final sample group. The results showed that joining a game community and playing in teams may help players build their leadership experience in games. The findings also suggest that there is a significant positive relationship between in‐game leadership and offline leadership. However, there were no significant differences in gender regarding in‐game and offline leadership. This study suggests that MMORPGs offer a useful place where people can grow their leadership skills and potentially transfer them into the real world.     

We belong together: belonging to the principal’s in-group protects teachers from the negative effects of task conflict on psychological safety

Psychological safety is the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Critical team events such as conflict and faultlines (hypothetical lines that split a team into subgroups) should impact psychological safety. Previous research has shown the benefits of task conflict on team outcomes under certain conditions and the consistently negative effects of demographic faultline strength on team outcomes. We propose that being close to the principal (what we call belonging to the principal’s in-group) should help attenuate the negative effects of task conflict and faultlines among teachers, because it is associated with a more effective working relationship. In a survey study with 244 teachers from 45 primary schools, we tested the moderating effect of belonging to the principal’s in-group vs. belonging to an out-group on the relationships of task conflict and faultlines on psychological safety. Results of multilevel model tests showed that relationship conflict (but not task conflict) and faultlines decreased psychological safety. However, when teachers belonged to the principal’s in-group as compared to an out-group, task conflict had no negative effect on psychological safety. We present implications to bridge the negative effects due to subgroup presence, so that psychological safety can become a resource for all.     

团队文化和领导方式对团队创新的影响及其机制

以中国南方某省级电信运营公司及其所属18个市级分公司的90个团队、306名团队成员为样本,探讨了市场导向、学习导向这两种团队文化特质与团队创新的关系及其影响机制。回归分析结果表明:(1)市场导向与学习导向正向预测团队创新。(2)团队反思在市场导向、学习导向与团队创新关系中起着完全中介作用。(3)领导方式在团队文化与团队反思的关系中具有调节作用,总体而言,在一个有利于创新的团队文化氛围中,变革型领导相比交易型领导更能促成反思和创新,但其正向调节效应并不十分稳定。     

Modelling Distributed Leadership and Management Effectiveness: Primary School Senior Management Teams in England and Wales

This article argues that the notion of distributed leadership and management has potential to illuminate school-level relationships, a significant area of school effectiveness and improvement research and development activity. It reports how research findings were used inductively to model effectiveness of senior management teams in British primary schools, which represent one form of distributed leadership and management. Difficulties in establishing effectiveness are reviewed; a heuristic model of team operation is put forward as a basis for identifying team effectiveness; relevant criteria employed by informants in research schools and inspectors are summarised in relation to the model, supported by findings from observation of meetings; and key findings and judgements of effectiveness are synthesised as a speculative contingency model of team effectiveness focusing on balancing contradictory beliefs in a management hierarchy and in equal contribution within the team. An agenda for research, practice and policy is suggested.     

Hazing rites/rights: using outdoor- and adventure education-based orientation to effect positive change for first-year athletes

This study is a qualitative examination of the experiences and impact of participating in an outdoor-based and adventure education-based orientation as an alternative to traditional forms of sport team initiation. Traditional forms of initiation for the participants in this study had included hazing ceremonies, whereby new team members were forced to engage in degrading, humiliating and abusive activities to secure their place on a team. Following an experiential weekend orientation that incorporated cooperative, team-building and adventure-based challenges, interviews were conducted with male and female varsity athletes from collegiate hockey, volleyball, badminton and basketball teams in Canada. The participants observed how the cooperative, outdoor team activities contributed to an egalitarian, inclusive climate, which promoted team cohesion, communication and support among veteran and rookie athletes. Tackling team challenges that required support and cooperation for success facilitated the restructuring of pre-established hierarchical relationships, which led to changes in the ways athletes perceived and subsequently treated each other throughout the orientation and into their season. This study highlights some of the promising possibilities for creating new welcoming traditions for collegiate athletic teams that draw from experiential outdoor education and adventure-based models.     

Establishing and maintaining high-performing leadership teams: a primary perspective

This article reports on the findings from a study into high-performing leadership teams in English primary schools. The schools, in the sample, received ‘outstanding’ Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) grades overall, and for leadership and management, in their most recent school inspection. The evidence suggests that developing a successful primary school leadership team takes time, commitment and continuity. The development of leaders requires a deliberate approach to build individual capacity and team unity. Effective team working takes time to develop and that ‘quick fix’ solutions to inadequate team work are inappropriate.     

Observing Leadership Roles in Shared Decision Making: A Preliminary Analysis of Three Teams

Despite recent attention to shared decision making as an approach to school reform, relatively little research has been conducted on the topic, and much of that research has relied on interviews and field notes, rather than systematic observation of team functioning. This investigation integrated systematic observations and interviews. The purpose of this study was to describe the leadership behaviors exhibited by principals, team leaders, and other team members (teachers, parents, students). We defined leadership according to team member contributions to decisions (decision content, decision-making processes, and statement function, such as initiating topics and making suggestions). This investigation used a comparative case study approach to examine the shared decision-making teams from three schools during the teams' first year. Results revealed variability in leadership across the three teams. Two teams were characterized by positive group process procedures with active involvement from a number of team members. A third team was dominated by the building principal with minimal input from most team members. This team appeared to be less productive than the other two. These findings are viewed in relationship to prior research literature concerning the ambiguity of team members' roles, lack of clarity concerning the power of shared decision-making teams, and the impact of school vision. Suggestions are made for future research.     

Collective self-efficacy expectations in Co-teaching teams – what are the influencing factors?

Scholars have studied collective teacher efficacy mainly at the school level. The present study also focuses on collective teacher efficacy expectations, but it emphasises the collaborative teaching of two teachers working together in one classroom. This study investigates personal, contextual, and systemic factors (e.g. experience, gender, class composition, pleasure with Co-teaching and its standards, knowledge about specific Co-teaching skills, the way how the team partner was chosen, etc.) that may influence collective self-efficacy expectations of Co-teacher teams. For the present study, 264 teachers who were part of a Co-teaching team finished an online questionnaire. Results from multiple regression analysis indicated that team characteristics influenced the subjective evaluation of efficacy expectations in teams much more than individual characteristics or the social context in which Co-teaching teams worked.     

Distributed leadership in practice in Finnish schools

The aim of this study is to explore what aspects the principals and the members of the management teams in the primary and upper secondary education schools in Vantaa support distributed leadership in their school and how necessary they see that distributed leadership is extended to the students in matters concerning the curriculum and the development of teaching practices. The research method was a survey based on a questionnaire of 48 questions, where the respondents evaluated the preconditions of distributed leadership in their school. The principals and members of the management teams in the primary and upper secondary schools in Vantaa see distributed leadership mostly as delegation of predetermined tasks than the interaction among leaders, followers and situations. The results strengthen the view of distributed leadership as a phenomenon which in its primitive form can be seen in the official structures of the school and as delegation based on a formal position in the more advanced view distributed leadership can be seen as interaction among the management team and in the situations in the official and unofficial structures of the school.     

Getting into teams in physical education and exclusion processes among students

Although splitting up a class into teams is a consistent didactical element in physical education (PE), it is under-investigated in terms of how students handle the social dynamics in these situations. Therefore, the present study examines the strategies of exclusion as markers for non-recognition when students are split up into teams/pairs. The data set includes video data from 6 different classes (a total of 59 video sequences) and 40 video-stimulated recall interviews with children who were excluded when the class was split up into teams/pairs or with children that excluded others. Sociograms as well as PE teacher ratings about their students’ sport competence were also analysed. Four different exclusion and inclusion strategies were identified: accepting or ignoring “assurance strategies” before the class is split up into teams/pairs, negotiating the affiliation of an individual when students get into pairs, publicly denying the affiliation to a team, and publicly negotiating the individual’s value for a team. The findings show that students use the team-selection proceedings and situations when the class was split up into teams as opportunities to transmit non-recognition. The social order was publicly demonstrated and legitimated.