Group and Organizational Learning

The goal of this chapter is to set the stage for readers of the Handbook. After providing our definitions of group and organizational learning, we discuss factors that stimulated prior interest in these phenomena. Next, we outline a broad conceptual framework for analyzing group and organizational learning (Argote & Miron-Spektor, 2011) that highlights important themes in the chapters that make up the volume. We devote the bulk of our effort to summarizing these chapters, with the goal of identifying theoretically significant similarities and differences between them. In so doing, we first discuss contributions dealing with processes of group and organizational learning and then focus on those involving contextual influences on learning. We conclude by noting important themes in current efforts to understand group and organizational learning and by suggesting promising directions for future theoretical development and empirical research.