Improving teamworking competence through action learning. Experiences in operations management education
Cristina Garcia-Palao, Maria J. Oltra-Mestre, Paul Coughlan
2019
Action Learning: Research and Practice
Teamworking competence is essential in many operations management environments and can be developed through formal education and practice-based experiences. The main objective of this paper is to describe and to reflect on how to facilitate students in their development in teamworking competence through action learning in Operations Management education. The research design is built around action learning research undertaken by faculty members enquiring into student action learning cycles. What
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... emerges is an understanding of a contingent connection between the classic Tuckman teamworking stages and educator interventions where the nature and timing of the interventions differ as the team evolves. These new practice-based insights illustrate the co-development of students' teamworking competence and educators' capability to facilitate learning in action about teamworking. They can be used as a guide for educators and practitioners involved in the development of teamworking competence to design and implement an action learningbased educational initiative. Introduction It is something of a cliché to say that you cannot learn to ride a bicycle through reading a book on cycling. Rather, you have to wobble and fall off before you can ride with confidence and competence. Said differently, components of knowledge may be acquired by different means: know-why through a process of learning by studying, know-what through a process of learning by using and know-how through a process of learning by doing (Garud, 1997) . Learning to work with and through others in a team, like cycling, requires active engagement rather than just passive reflection. The concept can be explored in the abstract (know-why) but practice (know-what and know-why) brings with it the possibility of effective implementation. There is an extensive literature on teamworking, which captures and codifies critical aspects of the approach. This literature can inform and illustrate but, in isolation, it leaves much to be learned before engagement in teamworking can be approached with confidence. In practice, many tasks require teams in order to bring together the necessary diversity of functional skills required to deliver the expected value. However, a group is not a team and enacting collaborative discourse around the task will not happen if group members do not or cannot learn to interact and to collaborate. Said differently, the development of teamworking competence is not a matter of straightforward implementation and repetition, even if the context of a task remains unchanged. Again, in practice, the context does change as interdependencies, variations, variability and newness intervene (MacKechnie, 2006). Chatenier et al. (2009) noted that to manage teams, it is useful to understand the interactions among individuals with different frames of reference. So, the research question emerges: how can practice and literature-based reflection on that practice be combined to develop teamworking Page 2 of 26 competence in a higher education course context. This is not a new question. The development of teamworking competence can emerge through gaining experience in practice and through formal education (Ellis et al., 2005). So, what's the problem? In practice, many practitioners may not be educators; while in formal education, some educators may not have experience of working outside of the academic context. These shortcomings leave it to the nascent team and teamworkers in the class or in the firm to figure out (or not) what might be possible through unsystematic trial and error. In operations, inputs are converted into outputs and there is an interconnection between the operating model, the business model and the social model which is to be managed (Coughlan and Coghlan, 2016). Teamworking influences and performance have been studied in different operations management (OM) contexts such as those related to new product development (Revilla and Knoppen, 2012), quality (Easton and Rosenzweig, 2012) and lean production (Dabhilkar and Åhlström, 2013). Teamworking is recognised in manufacturing and service operations not only as a means to increase organisation competitiveness, but also as an organisational system that improves the working environment, internal communication, the integration of new members, the motivation of workers and the transmission of culture and values of the organisation (Delarue et al, 2008; Fernández et al, 2006). The authors teach in the domain of Operations Management in a Spanish university and some, individually, have written about teaching, learning and action learning. This paper focuses on the formal education system and explores how educators in OM can facilitate learning about teamworking and improve teamworking competence through facilitating teamworking in practice. This focus challenges the role of the educator as a specialist, imparting domain knowledge to students without necessarily developing their abilities to think independently, to communicate effectively, to develop change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers. Boak, G. 2016. "Enabling team learning in healthcare." Action Learning: Research and Practice 13 (2): 101-117. Bonebright, D.A. 2010. "40 years of storming: a historical review of Tuckman's model of small group development." Human Resource Development International 13 (1): 111-120.
doi:10.1080/14767333.2019.1655391
fatcat:4cmxa2blp5hixphsigonxmd7om