Diving too Deep: How Cognitive Absorption and Group Learning Behavior Affect Individual Learning

Since organizations and educational institutions are moving toward a training approach which emphasizes the active involvement of participants, there is growing interest in understanding how individual engagement in the training experience affects practicing managers’ individual learning. We identify cognitive absorption as the construct that better describes the state of full engagement and immersion that new approaches in management training require of learners. While some research has emphasized the positive effect of absorption, we focus on the drawbacks of this individual state and on how group-level behaviors can mitigate negative effects on individual learning. We test our cross-level model on 190 individuals embedded in 38 groups. The results of our analysis show that (1) cognitive absorption presents an inverted U-shape effect in predicting participant learning; (2) group learning behavior has a cross-level moderating influence on the relationship between cognitive absorption and participant learning, thus mitigating the negative effects of absorption.