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

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…