Team learning in disruptive contexts: from operational to dynamic capabilities at an airline during COVID-19

Lunch Seminar in presence

Stefan Meisiek
The University of Sydney Business School

The team learning literature posits that team learning plays a bridging role between the decisions of senior managers and the development of organizational capabilities, particularly in fastmoving contexts. In this view, senior management creates a latent context, within which resides the active context of team learning in support of operative or dynamic capabilities.  However, the micro-dynamics underpinning balanced team learning in support of both operative and dynamic within the latent context remains opaque. Balanced, internal team learning has been suggested to be crucial in periods of disruptive environmental forces. Taking a process perspective on team learning, we studied an operational team in an airline during the COVID-19 pandemic from 2019 to 2021. The longitudinal qualitative study suggests that team learning in a crisis context shifted its support from operational capabilities to dynamic capabilities over time. The team maintained ‘normal’ operations, while at the same time gradually learning through tentative creation of new processes relevant to the continuously disruptive context.

Stefan Meisiek is Deputy Head of Discipline and Associate Professor in the Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship discipline at the University of Sydney Business School. His research concerns how leadership and strategic choices enable or constrains innovation efforts. This includes motivating organizational members for inquiry into pernicious problems, challenging basic assumptions, and giving license for dreaming, imagining, and creating. He founded the Studio at Copenhagen Business School for arts and design-based business education and recently launched the Business Innovation Lab to help companies develop innovation capabilities and cultures. Stefan received his PhD in Management from the Stockholm School of Economics, and his MA from the Free University, Berlin. 

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