Guest editorial

Abstract

Introducing this special issue on team learning This special issue is focused on team learning, the fourth discipline proposed by Senge (1990) in his seminal book on learning organizations, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Our motivation to propose a call for papers on team learning to The Learning Organization Journal (TLO) arose out of two interrelated reasons: on the one hand, the recognition that team learning has been growing as a research topic over the years; on the other hand, this growth has driven this stream of literature away from the literature on learning organizations (Rebelo et al., 2020). Hence, one of the objectives of publishing this special issue in TLO is to once again place team learning as a key feature of a learning organization, thus contributing to drawing the attention of organizational learning and learning organizations' researchers, as well of practitioners, to the importance of learning at the team level.In fact, since the publication of Senge's book, team learning has been growing as an autonomous and interdisciplinary research topic with numerous articles centered on learning at this level of analysis. The growth of this research domain is boosted by the fact that teams have increasingly become the building blocks of organizations. Because teams are created with the aim of generating value for the organization, research on the conditions and processes that foster team effectiveness has received increasing attention (Mathieu et al., 2017). Team learning has been one of the elected processes in terms of research on team effectiveness, justified by continuous empirical support of its positive relationship with several criteria of team effectiveness (

Team learning in the context of learning organizations

“…However, uncertain, dynamic and ambiguous situations have a particular impact on teamwork and team learning, and deserve a closer look at their dynamics. Therefore, they are particularly important for learning organizations, which prompted guest editors Teresa Rebelo, Paulo Renato Lourenço and Isabel Dordio Dimas to take a closer look at their dynamics in Special Issue (issue one) of volume 29 of The Learning Organization journal (Rebelo, Lourenço, & Dimas, 2022).…”