Investigation of the motivating factors influencing team learning

Abstract

Learning is a continuous process by which we obtain new knowledge and experience. Team learning can improve the efficiency of this process. Apart from absorption of knowledge by individuals, group interactions contribute towards each others’ learning as well. The aim of this study is to investigate the motivating effects of various factors on team learning. Team learning is a threshold for us to learn more about organizational learning which serves as an important key to determine the success of an organization. Existing research has introduced several motivational factors and their effects on individual learning. What we are going to investigate in this study is whether they also have motivational effects in the process of team learning. Well established Need Theory and Process Theory found in literature help us to lay the foundation of the research framework. The focus of the first is to find out what are the factors that have motivating effect on team learning while the later sheds light on how they may influence this team learning process and outcome. A number of motivational factors are selected and tested for their relationship with team learning. We targeted a group of university students in a course which adopted group work and team learning as our survey subjects for our study of motivational effects on team learning. The hypotheses set assumed that all the motivation factors examined in this research have positive influence on team learning. Quantitative and qualitative questionnaires are designed and distributed to the survey subjects at different stages of their study period during one whole semester. Longitudinal study can help us know not only about the opinion at a certain stage but also detect any differences over time. Data collected from the quantitative questionnaires are analyzed using SPSS and other statistical tools. Both descriptive and analytical results are obtained through this process. Results from the data analysis indicate that most of the factors selected for this study evidently have positive motivating effects on team learning except for the one factor, “Punishment”. Findings from qualitative survey show time effect on some of the factors, which are largely related to the external environment. Subjects provide high priority on the intrinsic factors which do not easily show a clear trend over time. The difficulty to measure human perception provides us with potential to do further research. More work can also be done on other factors using the similar research framework to study further the relationship between motivation and team learning.

Date of Award	2 Oct 2007
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Kong Bieng CHUAH (Supervisor)