Team characteristics and employees' individual learning: A cross-level investigation

To build and maintain their competitive advantage, companies increasingly rely on effective learning processes. However, a review of the literature shows sparse research on the understanding of team effects on learning at the micro or individual level. One of the most important contexts for individual learning is collaboration with others. We therefore contribute to the literature by examining how three critical team level variables are related to team members' individual project learning. We argue that team meta-knowledge, team creativity, and team external cooperation are all positively related to individuals' project learning. We tested our hypotheses on 94 projects represented by 340 individual responses. Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling analysis, our results provide support for the positive effects of team creativity and team external cooperation, but not for team meta-knowledge. We discuss the implications of our findings for human resource management.