In working to understand the predictors of experiential learning in teams, researchers have focused on one variable more than any other—psychological safety. In virtually all of this work, psychological safety is viewed as a direct predictor of team learning and, through team learning, of team performance. We suggest that this work has overlooked the critical effect the nature of the task environment has on the capacity of psychological safety to have beneficial effects. To investigate this, we conduct a comprehensive meta-analysis of studies examining the relationships between psychological safety, team learning, and team performance. We find that psychological safety is more strongly associated with learning and performance in studies conducted in knowledge-intensive task settings, that is, settings that involve complexity, creativity, and sensemaking. The results of this study suggest that psychological safety may be insufficient to stimulate learning in groups where the task environment does not require learning.

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Whereas much of the literature on learning in groups suggests that hierarchy stifles learning, we suggest that, in fact, hierarchy can play important—even critical—roles in facilitating experiential learning by providing a reliable and robust mechanism for setting direction despite potentially paralyzing disagreements. More specifically, we suggest that hierarchy can promote experiential learning by serving three key learning-enabling group functions—bounding, converging, and structuring—and then getting out of the way. We note, however, that intragroup hierarchies often fall short of serving these functions, and we explore a number of factors that help to explain when hierarchy will promote rather than inhibit group learning. We illustrate our arguments using the widely used case of IDEO and the shopping cart project—a case in which hierarchy is explicitly criticized but strategically utilized.

Despite the growing popularity of shared leadership, there is little research on how beliefs about the benefits of shared leadership—a shared leadership structure schema (LSS)—affect individual outcomes. We address this by integrating adaptive leadership and conservation of resources theories. We apply adaptive leadership theory to hypothesize that a shared LSS leads individuals to support shared leadership by interacting more frequently and taking on interpersonal responsibility, especially when low peer engagement signals a leadership void that shared LSS members try to fill. However, adaptive leadership theory does not discuss how the tendencies motivated by shared LSS impacts members’ outcome. Therefore, we apply conservation of resources theory to hypothesize that taking on interpersonal responsibility makes frequent interactions more stressful, thereby harming individual enjoyment. Further, the demands of interpersonal responsibility reduce members’ ability to process the information acquired in interactions, which negates interaction frequency’s usual performance benefits. Together, these theories suggest that, especially when peer engagement is low, shared LSS has a negative indirect effect on enjoyment and an attenuating effect on performance through interaction frequency due to shared LSS members taking on interpersonal responsibility. We test our model using five waves of multisource data on student consulting teams. Our results extend understanding of shared LSS’s consequences to the individual level and highlight potential costs of supporting shared leadership.

Information elaboration is crucial for successfully responding to change, and teams inevitably frame changes to ground them. Yet, there is sparse knowledge around how framing affects information elaboration. In investigating the relationship that framing has with information elaboration, we show that framing starts a domino effect throughout the phases of information elaboration. Our experiment shows that opportunity framing motivates teams to engage with the change by asking questions about it, which increases the sharing and integrating of unique information, thereby improving decision performance. In contrast, threat framing is followed by avoiding the change through making status quo-directed statements and then discussing shared information, ultimately lowering decision performance. Our findings contribute to the information elaboration literature by helping explain differences in information elaboration’s effectiveness through uncovering interdependent behaviors. Next, we move information elaboration’s antecedents beyond static characteristics to include dynamic tactics.