Team Emotions and Team Learning

We review literature that informs the role of team emotions in team learning. We focus our review on two types of studies: team emotions as end states and team emotions as ongoing interactions. Organizational research has focused mainly on end-state emotions, where team emotions are examined in the end at an aggregate level. Studies on emotions as ongoing interactions (e.g., coevolution in psycho-physiological or behavioral patterns over time) have mostly been conducted in the area of joint action research. For each type of team emotion study, we review literature that informs the four aspects of team learning identified by Argote (2013): sharing, generating, evaluating, and combining knowledge. We discuss how the team emotions literature contains interesting insights about team learning, but also leaves room for more research. Finally, we discuss the potential in the two types of team emotion studies and offer suggestions about how to combine them in future research.