The Influence Of Individualism-Collectivism On Team Learning

The production, dissemination, exchanges and use of knowledge has increasingly become an important driving force of economic growth during the process of the transformation from industrial economy to knowledge economy of human society. Only a continuously learning organization can keep pace with the times. While in modern societies the basic unit of learning is team rather than individual. It is the team learning that promote the learning of organization. Therefore, the organization learning and team learning theory has grasped the attention of scholars and entrepreneurs in the west since its proposition. At the same time, more and more researchers found the application of management theory and practices in different cultures diversified. The cross-cultural theory started to rise simultaneously. Management theory and model arisen from the west may have an "acclimatized" phenomenon when applied in China, or may be found more adaptable.I chose an important aspect of Chinese culture-collectivism cultural orientation as a research variable, to explore how they affect team learning. As an important dimension of Hofstede's National Culture Model, individualism-collectivism has attracted extensively attention of scholars ever since Hofstede. Moreover, it has been defined elaborately as a single variable and divided into several dimensions. According to Simmel's Trust Theory and the former study, I conducted the research hyposesis and chose to measure informant the orientation of individualism and collectivism at the individual level and to further explore whether and how the individualism-collectivism influences the team learning behavior of employees.There are three steps in this study. First of all, provide the theoretical model and research hypotheses on the basis of literature review; secondly, design the questionnaire and research in the high-tech industry; at last, process and analyze the data recovered with the statistic analysis software. The results basically confirmed the hypothesis put forward by this study. The main conclusions are:①the influence of collectivism culture on the "experiment" dimension of Team Learning is not significant, except for the facilitation of "the value attached to working alone",②"the value attached to working alone" and "beliefs about effects of personal pursuits on group productivity" prompt the communication and record dimension of Team Learning.③"personal independence and self reliance" hinders the communication, reflection and record of Team Learning.④"the value attached to working alone" prompts the reflection of Team Learning; the influence of "espousal of norms about the subordination of personal needs to group interests" is not significant. The dissertation also pointed out the limitation:the sample size and the scope are limited and the type of culture is single.