Team Learning in Information Systems Development - a literature Review

Information Systems Development (ISD) is fast moving, knowledge-intensive and requires a substantive amount of teamwork. In order to develop quality software, teams need to leverage the skills and knowledge of each team member. ISD teams who engage in learning at a group level can perform more effectively and efficiently. However, relative to other disciplines, knowledge and literature about team learning in ISD research is new and dispersed. This fact hampers the cumulative progress in research that seeks to answer questions about how ISD teams learn to work together and improve their performance. We draw on and extend the classification scheme of Edmondson et al. (2007) and conduct a review of ISD team learning research literature. We synthesize the main findings and highlight the limitations of existing approaches. We emphasize potential directions for future research while focusing on the resulting implications for ISD management and methodology. We further demonstrate that there are four distinctive streams in ISD team learning research that differ in the manner that they conceptualize team learning, underlying theories, and research methodologies. Finally, we illustrate how these differing streams can cross-fertilize and thereby present notable aspects of team learning presently addressed by related disciplines for which there is scant or non-existent