ABSTRACT
Macrocognition is an emerging multidisciplinary area of theory development and research activity that is focused on understanding how groups, teams, and other collective entities learn, develop meaningful knowledge, and apply it to resolve significant and challenging problems. The literature on team effectiveness has also exhibited considerable interest in team learning and cognitive representations of team knowledge such as team mental models, transactive memory, and knowledge stocks (Edmondson, Dillon, & Roloff, 2007). However, the origins and process of team learning remain conceptually murky, and there is considerable diversity in the ways that researchers have attempted to represent and measure team (and higher level) knowledge (DeChurch & Mesmer-Magnus, 2010; Klimoski & Mohammed, 1995; Rentsch, Small, & Hanges, 2008; Salas & Wildman, 2009) and the processes by which it is acquired, emerges, and manifests as a team-level property. Indeed, a recent monograph concluded that although there is high interest in these phenomena and promising research progress, much more conceptual clarity is needed to enhance understanding of the nature of team learning and to advance useful and robust theoretical representations to drive the measurement of collective knowledge constructs (Kozlowski & Ilgen, 2006).
