Team Learning Of College Students: Model Construction And Team Effectiveness

Team learning is theory from Organizational Behavior, but it's theoretical andapplicable value in high education is significant. The trend of globalization andinformatization challenge both enterprise and university. If team learning is popularized inuniversity, college students' ability of searching information and solving problem will beimproved. The author tried to use System Dynamics methodology to explore rules of teamlearning in different types of college students' team.In the first research,23members from33teams were interviewed. Results show thatteam learning activities exist in college students' teams. Four factors influence collegestudents' team leaning: a) motivation of relationship orientation and task orientation, b)affection: such as team trust and coherence, c) communication: High frequency interactionand conflict management, d) team leadership: leader's conscientiousness and democraticleadership. Typological difference was found in college student teams. There are two typesof team in the study, called management team and project team.In the second research,8variables were used to describe team learning and itsinfluential factor. The8variables were team learning, team trust (psychological safety),team goal clarity, team conflict, task interdependence, team leadership, team motivation,team satisfaction. Developed or edited questionnaires to measure these variables. Thequestionnaires were proved to have good reliability and validity. Using206college studentteams as subjects, being sure that all variables are team-level variables and transformingindividual data into team-level data, researcher compared difference of variables betweentwo types of college student team. Significant differences are found in7variables.In the third research, team learning model of college students were constructed usingdata in the second research. The differences of team learning models between two types ofcollege student teams are significant. The most important differences of models aredissimilarity in antecedent variables. The antecedent variables in the management team learning model are team motivation, team leadership, team goal clarity, team conflict, andantecedent variable in project teams learning model are team motivation, team leadership,task interdependent.In the last research, researcher designed quasi-experiment to testify the relationshipbetween team learning and team performance. Team leaning and team conflict weredefined as independent variables, team performance was dependent variable. Eight teamswere selected as subjects, they finished certain team tasks in the laboratory, and theirperformances were measured concisely. Results show that the relationship between teamlearning and team performance is nonlinear and complex. When the task difficulty is low,team learning orientation and team conflict predict team performance together; when thetask difficulty is high, team learning orientation is the only predictor of team performance.