Regulation and Self-Regulation of Team Learning and Innovation Activities

Abstract: Self-regulated learning and innovation activities within teams are those processes with which team members collectively activate and sustain cognition, affects and behaviors which are systematically oriented towards the achievement of their team’s goals. Although research on self-managing teams exists, there remains considerable confusion on many issues including what self-regulation is and how regulation of self-regulated learning and innovation activities is carried out. A primary contribution of this dissertation is to introduce a theoretical framework for analysing and applying regulative actions in organizational environment. The aim of this dissertation is to advance the understanding on how regulation of self- managing team learning and innovation activities can happen starting from an analysis of the self-regulative learning processes of individuals within teams and of their own determinants.  This dissertation has  three objectives: 1) to present internal team mechanisms involved in the self-regulation  of teams’ learning activities, their interactive dynamics and their corresponding major organisational determinants; 2) to rely on this novel understanding to detect relevant regulative actions which are able to indirectly influence teams’ self-regulatory learning and innovative behaviour; 3) to offer empirical evidence of how specific regulative actions affect team learning and innovation performance. We discover that there are four major constructs associated with the regulation of teams’ learning and innovation activities: feedback loops and goals equally combining learning and performance items, networks of influence made up of managers and stakeholders interacting with teams through systematic routines, training programmes for team members, dialectical perspective on learning and innovation to force in the managerial layers.