Team Learning and Its Impact on Marketing Team Performance: An Empirical Study

Abstract

The paper explains the effects of internal and external team learning behaviors on the performance of marketing teams. The survey was conducted in the context of a multinational Pharmaceutical Corporation marketing its products in Turkey. Data were collected from members of marketing team which included medical sales representatives, specialized medical sales representatives and districts heads of marketing. The results indicate that both the internal team learning and the external team learning behaviors play significant roles in ensuring the success of marketing teams in continuously identifying, anticipating and satisfying the customer requirements profitably through an efficient deployment of the marketing teams' resources. Keywords:Team learning, team performance, organizational learning, Individual learning 1. Introduction Gryskiewicz (1999) argues that to develop a favorable climate for creativity, innovation and renewal, the organizations need to develop teams which work on a shared philosophy, are interdependent and are keen to learn on how to enhance their performance by working together. The relationship between team performance and the collective intelligence of a team has a larger value compared to the sum of intelligence of individual members (Senge 1992). Therefore, the leaning-performance phenomenon, which adequately demonstrates synergy (Christopher, Pearson and Entrekin 2003), fosters higher levels of adaptability, productivity and creativity than any individual employee can offer, and eventually results in sophisticated, innovative and comprehensive solutions to the organizational problems (Beers 2005;Savelsbergh, Heijden. and Poell 2007). Savelsbergh et al. (2007) (2001) have also cited the findings of Kilgore (2001) on collective learning by asserting that certain learning behaviors originated from collective system and social interaction lead to the emergence of collective learning products such as shared ideas, beliefs, mental models, knowledge and action and help individuals to engage in integration process. As such, team learning can be regarded as a social phenomenon. Christopher et al. (2003) found that the use of teams provides the merits of empowering people to utilize their abilities effectively which allows the managers to focus their attention on strategic priorities instead of just supervising the subordinates which eventually not only improves their efficiency (Entrekin and Court 2001) but also brings knowledge, skills and experience to the workplace (Avery 2000). These intellectual assets help in operating the organization effectively and efficiently (Brooks 1994) through creating synergies (Jassawalla and Sashittal 1999). The enhancement of team learning accumulated through the deployment of cross-functional teams helps in gaining greater competitive advantage (Banker, Field, Schroeder and Sinha 1996), enhancing continuous improvements of quality, innovation, customer satisfaction (Boyett and Conn 1991) as well as the employee satisfaction; reducing cost and improvin...

Organizational learning in the Philippines: how do team and individual learning contribute?

“…According to Bain (), Brown and Duguid () and Hassan et al. (, 124) organizations can learn better if teams learn collectively through experience and knowledge sharing among individuals. This notion is also supported by a number of researchers (Argyris and Schön ; Gibson and Vermeulen ; Van der Vegt and Bunderson ) who indicated a positive relationship between team learning behaviors and team performance.…”