ABSTRACT
This chapter examines mutuality as a critical antecedent of successful collaboration performance and the importance of active listening in team interaction. The team interaction aspect of active listening emphasizes team members taking the time to listen and examine all sides of an issue prior to taking action. Research on student project teams shows that teams cultivate teamwork skills through experiential learning, an individual-level learning process involving the combination of two dimensions: grasping knowledge and transforming knowledge. Experiential learning theory, using the concept of learning dimensions in conversational learning spaces, provides an empirically validated scale for team learning—the Team Learning Inventory. The chapter presents key insight from team literature and mutuality to support hypotheses development. The idea of mutuality is supported in inter-organizational literature, organizational behavior literature; and collaboration literature. The survey results for mutually beneficial exploration are consistent with the literature on corporate social performance, building upon components of win-win paradigms, enlightened value maximization, and enlightened stakeholder theory.
