How team learning behaviors can help project teams to increase the performance of their projects.
Project Management Institute, 2010
Peter Storm, Chantal Savelsbergh and Ben Kuipers (Performability) show how team learning helps to improve the performance of project teams. Based on a study of 38 project teams primarily working in engineering, construction and infrastructure, the authors discovered the importance of paying attention to the cooperation processes of project team members.
The study in which 245 project managers and project members participated demonstrates that the complexity of projects does not affect the performance of project teams directly. Rather it increases the role stress of project members in terms of ambiguity and overload. It is this kind of stress on team level that decreases the performance. However, learning behavior in teams, such as exploring, reflecting and feedback seeking, helps teams to significantly decrease the experienced role stress and at the same time improve the performance of projects.
It is this type of behavior that project teams need to be much more aware of and invest in from the project start-up until the project ending. Storm, Savelsbergh and Kuipers show the importance of leadership in this process and propose six steps to improve both learning and performing.
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