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When to Put the Brakes on Learning

Learning-focused management teams can actually depress company
performance.

by J. Stuart Bunderson and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe

J. Stuart Bunderson is an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Washington University in St. Louis.
Kathleen M. Sutcliffe is an associate professor of organizational behavior at the University of Michigan in Ann
Arbor. The full results of their research are scheduled to be published in the June 2003 issue of The Journal of
Applied Psychology.

How much should management teams focus on learning – on the business of
developing skills, finding best practices, and seeking new ideas and challenges?

Consider the distinct learning cultures of two business-unit management teams we
studied at a Fortune 100 consumer products company. Members of the red team
embraced change and continuous learning, constantly reevaluating and modifying their
unit’s business practices. Those on the green team, meanwhile, took a different tack:
Approaching their work with an if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it attitude, they focused on
leveraging past successes and refining current processes.

At the end of the year, which team met its profitability targets and received big
bonuses and congratulations from the area office? Both did. At first blush, that’s a
surprising finding. Most executives would predict that a team clinging to the tried and
true is doomed to stagnate. And by the same token most would believe that learning
drives performance and confers competitive advantage.

But a decade of research on how and why teams attempt to learn, and what happens
when they do, suggests that more isn’t always better. As the red and green teams’
experiences show, two teams at opposite ends of the learning spectrum can reach
similar levels of performance. Moreover, management theory and simulations of
organizational learning suggest that too great an emphasis on learning can actually
hurt performance. An overemphasis on learning and experimentation, for instance,
may distract teams from their real goals or induce them to abandon adequate
solutions in favor of untried approaches. If that’s so, it has important implications that
may affect how companies balance team-learning efforts against staying the course.

To examine these problems, we divided the business units from our consumer
products company into high, medium, and low performers. We measured performance
according to the units’ profitability relative to plan over the preceding two years. Next,
we randomly selected 15 management teams from each performance level for study –
45 in all. Teams were composed of a general manager and a plant manager, as well as
managers for marketing, regional sales, finance, equipment, human resources, and
administration. Through surveys and interviews, we assessed each team’s learning
orientation – how much members felt that the team emphasized learning, developing
skills, seeking challenges, and taking risks.

Getting Team Learning Right

Too much emphasis on learning can compromise any team’s performance. But

compared with high-performing teams, those that have been doing poorly gain more –

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By comparing a team’s learning orientation with its subsequent unit performance, we
were able to show that there was an optimal point beyond which more emphasis on
learning actually depressed performance. Where this point fell for a given team
depended on that team’s recent performance history: As we had suspected, poorly
performing teams benefited more from an emphasis on learning than better-
performing teams did (see the graph “Getting Team Learning Right”).

If It Ain’t Broke, Tweak It

It might be hard to give up the idea that a greater emphasis on learning is better. But
our data clearly suggest that managers – and their companies – would be best served
by identifying the appropriate level of learning for their teams. Here are some rules of
thumb.

First, although managers should avoid aggressively “fixing” a team that’s not broken,
they should never stop tweaking. As the graph shows, even the highest-performing
teams in our study improved when they placed a low-to-moderate emphasis on
learning – that is, when they tweaked their success formula. But when these high-
performing teams overemphasized learning – when their tweaking turned into
fundamental rethinking – their performance rapidly declined.

Second, if a team is performing poorly relative to its peers, managers have everything
to gain and nothing to lose by increasing the emphasis on learning. The low-
performing teams in our study improved most when they placed a moderate-to-high
emphasis on learning.

Finally, team leaders must actively set the learning tone for their team. Their challenge
is to balance the benefits of experimentation, innovation, and renewal with the need
for stability and efficiency. Team leaders must identify the point of diminishing, and
then negative, returns on learning and ratchet back a team’s learning efforts
accordingly to sustain the highest performance.

and lose less – from ramped up learning efforts.

Reprint Number F0302D

Copyright © 2003 Harvard Business School Publishing.
This content may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy,

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