From Individual Expertise to Collective Intelligence: Building Learning-Capable Teams, by Jonathan H. Westover PhD

Abstract: Organizations increasingly rely on teams to navigate complexity, drive innovation, and adapt to rapid change, yet practitioners often lack evidence-based guidance on which investments genuinely foster team learning. This article synthesizes findings from a comprehensive meta-analysis by Nellen, Gijselaers, and Grohnert (2020) examining 50 studies across 4,778 professional teams in manufacturing, healthcare, product development, and professional services. The analysis reveals that four emergent states—psychological safety, shared cognition, team potency/efficacy, and cohesion—explain substantially more variance in team learning than direct organizational interventions. However, organizations can indirectly influence these states through strategic deployment of job resources, cultivation of supportive culture and climate, design of enabling infrastructure, and enactment of top-level leadership behaviors. The evidence challenges conventional training-centric approaches, pointing instead toward systemic environmental design. Practitioners gain specific, quantified guidance on relative effect sizes to prioritize investments; researchers receive a consolidated framework identifying robust relationships and highlighting gaps requiring further investigation.