Cornelia Niessen
Age and learning during organizational change
Authors
Cornelia Niessen (University of Constance (D))
Adaptability to changes at the workplace is seen more and more as a key competence of today´s employees. While research has demonstrated that age alone accounts for little variance in work performance in stable work contexts, research suggests that adaptation to changes in the workplace context might decline with age. This longitudinal study investigated if there are age-related changes in learning, feedback-seeking and adaptive performance after changes at the workplace among a sample of 70 employees from a major multinational high tech corporation. More specifically, we examined the predictive value of age for learning (behavioural and cognitive learning), feedback seeking, and fit perceptions as well as performance. The participants had to fill out questionnaires one month before, and three month after an organizational change. Analyses of covariance (repeated measurement) that controlled for location and extent of change revealed significant interactions between age and change predicting cognitive learning, feedback seeking, fit, and task performance. After change older employees reported a lower level of reflection about the new task requirements, a lower fit with the new demands, and a lower level of task performance compared to younger employees. Moreover, younger employees diminished their feedback seeking after change. The study suggests that support and stimulation of cognitive learning might help particularly older employees to overcome their routines.
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Christiane Doerfler
Psychological safety and its influence on team learning
Authors
Christiane Doerfler (University of Fribourg)
Petra Klumb (University of Fribourg )
In organizations work is often assigned to teams therefore learning frequently takes place on the team level. Team learning is defined as relatively permanent change in the team’s collective level of knowledge and skill produced by the shared experience of the team members. These learning processes do not occur automatically; team members should engage in speaking up, reflecting, asking questions, seeking help, calling attention to mistakes or giving feedback to assure team learning. Although these behaviors often lead to better performance many team members don’t show them because they are afraid to appear as incompetent or bothering.
Psychological safety plays an important role in this matter. It goes beyond interpersonal trust and illustrates the degree to which employees perceive their work environment as safe to take interpersonal risks.
To investigate the relationship between psychological safety and team learning behavior as well as the mediating effect of team learning behavior on the relationship between psychological safety and team performance we observed thirty three-person-groups in a group discussion task. We manipulated the degree of psychological safety by a confederate moderator who showed a coaching, transformational or directive behavior. We hypothesized that voice behavior benefit particularly from coaching and transformational leadership. First analyses show indeed that the degree of psychological safety is differentially related to learning processes.
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Annette Kluge
Organizational Learning from Errors and Transformational Leadership
Authors
Annette Kluge (University of St.Gallen
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Stefan Schulz (University of St.Gallen)
Errors at work are an inevitable by-product of human labour. Thus, individual and organizational learning from errors (OLfE) at work and its systematic promotion becomes a strategic goal to support innovation and development. In parallel, it is widely assumed that transformational leaders do also support employees’ strive for innovation, excellence, positive attitudes towards change and continuous learning. Therefore, in a Swiss manufacturing organization (n = 280) we investigated the relationship between charismatic goal orientation (CGO), passive-avoidant leadership (PAL) and management-by-exception (MbE, a reduced set of MLQ-factors; Heinitz, Liepmann & Felfe, 2005) and components important for OLfE which are error-related leadership behaviours, support of other team members, task characteristics and organizational values (Kluge & Schilling, 2007). Performing a stepwise regession, the dominant impact of CGO on all four OLfE componentes became evident. Additionally, MbE affects the support of other team members negatively. The amount of errors which were factually discussed is negatively affected by PAL. In contrast, the amount of errors which are soundly analyzed is influenced by MbE and the task characteristics. These results demonstrate the strong impact of CGO on organizational learning from errors.
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Tanja Manser
Learning from critical incidents in healthcare settings: the perspective of knowledge-oriented cooperation
Authors
Tanja Manser (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich )
Theo Wehner (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich)
- Highly publicized adverse events in healthcare settings argue for the necessity of learning from failure so as to avoid recurrence and improve patient safety. As highlighted by case studies of industrial disasters such as Three Mile Island or Challenger, the local knowledge about potentially unsafe work practices and conditions increasing the likelihood of failure was present but not systematically shared within the organization. Many organization strive for increased organizational learning by building learning mechanisms such as focused event studies, safety dialogues, and blameless reporting of incidents into their work practices. Despite a variety of activities supporting the generation and transformation of knowledge (i.e. opportunities for organizational learning), health care organizations are confronted with barriers to engage in organizational learning processes. Referring to the concept of knowledge-oriented cooperation, this paper aims to facilitate future research in organizational learning in healthcare by describing organizational mechanisms learning and by discussing challenges to organizational learning in health care from the perspective of organizational psychology. Empirical examples of incident reporting systems and systematic incident investigation, case conferences, and simulation-based learning for individuals, teams, and organizations will be discussed in detail.
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