A Healthy Divide: Subgroups as a Stimulus for Team Learning Behavior

Abstract

We thank Pamela Haunschild, Madan Pillutla, and the three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments, and Mary Zellmer-Bruhn for assistance in data collection.This paper examines the relationship between subgroups and team learning behavior, defined as a cycle of experimentation, reflective communication, and codification. We develop the construct of "subgroup strength," defined as the degree of overlap across multiple demographic characteristics among a subset of team members. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we propose that the presence of subgroups within a team may stimulate learning behavior and that organizational design features, such as performance management by an external leader, team empowerment, and the availability of a knowledge management system, may have different effects on teams, depending on subgroup strength. Data on 156 teams in five pharmaceutical and medical products firms confirmed that moderately strong demographic subgroups in teams fostered learning behavior. In addition, both very homogeneous and very heterogeneous teams were more inclined to engage in learning behavior, but only if we controlled for the concurrent effect of subgroup strength. Finally, subgroup strength moderated the impact of organizational design features on team learning. Overall, this study contributes to the literature on team composition, design, and learning by highlighting the importance of subgroups for understanding team behavior. Ample research has been conducted on how the composition of work teams influences team behavior and effectiveness.The bulk of this research has focused on the heterogeneity that results from differences between members on demographic attributes such as age, sex, ethnicity, group tenure, and functional area (for reviews, see Jackson, May, and Whitney, 1995; Williams and O'Reilly, 1998; Earley and Gibson, 2002). Some researchers have argued for a positive influence of the differences between team members on team behavior, suggesting that they result in a higher combined cognitive capacity, which leads to more creativity, richer information processing, and higher quality decision making (

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