Managing Organisational Learning and Knowledge

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Management of Training and Development MSc

Assignment submission – Managing Organisational Learning and Knowledge

Alan Mumford (1993) defined management development as ‘an attempt to improve managerial effectiveness through a learning process’. Critically discuss this statement, comparing and contrasting a range of different approaches that human resource developers can adopt to promote and facilitate learning in organisations.

Abstract

This essay explores the notion that organisational development is intrinsically linked to the managerial development of is managerial decision makers. It explores a range of organisational approaches to learning and illustrates the changing requirements of a manager to understand, accommodate and develop these approaches for the benefit of the organisation. For this to be successful, it argues that managers must develop their outlook, approach, skills and understanding through a number of learning processes and therefore improve managerial effectiveness.

The contexts have been carefully chosen to illustrate that skills need to be developed, irrespective of the number of organisational subordinates, if a manager is to be fully effective to his employer. It briefly looks at an early management perspective, analyses why change was necessary, illustrates a link between learning and management before looking at some of the skills modern managers need. Finally, the essay will look at coaching, mentoring, experiential and action learning as examples learning approaches human resource developers can adapt to promote and facilitate learning in an organisation..

Introduction

‘There are three great mysteries in life: air to the bird, water to the fish, and human being to himself.’

Chinese proverb

 

The role of the modern manager has arguably been no more challenging than it is today. This has caused management development thinkers concentrate on areas often overlooked in earlier decades such as, learning, motivation, change, corporate responsibilities and cross-cultural issues to name but a few.

Consequently, the speed at which organisations must adapt to maintain a share of their respective market has continued to increase over recent decades, pushing the notion of knowledge management further up the strategic ladder. Increasingly, corporate strategists are requesting access to the organization’s human capital. In short, organisations have had to explore the notion that it is its people, with their knowledge, creativity and ability to adapt that can best exploited to gain a competitive advantage. However, as the proverb implies, people are a mystery, a complication which has left managers searching for many different approaches to improve effectiveness of their workplace.

However, irrespective of whichever approach is chosen, managers of an organisation will always have a role to play, and in the case of new processes will have to develop new skills alongside both their subordinates and organisation alike. In short, managers have had to develop through learning, alongside the organisation, if the strategic goals of a changing organisation are to be met. However, within this essay it is the management of explicit and tacit knowledge held by individuals and groups in the company that will be considered, and the relationship this approach has to managers, and how they need tolearn and develop to make this concept work successfully.

Learning and its relationship to the Organisation

Even if an organisation concludes that learning provides the answer to its further development it has to consider, not only the approach, but also how people learn in different contexts. With , , , , , ,  and  to name but a few, all making a case for consideration, the complex issue of learning becomes self-evident. Yet, understanding how people learn is core to any organisational approach to learning.

In terms of managers, it is still widely believed that management development equates to management training, therefore ‘send him on a course’. However, this view assumes that management development is ‘done’ by someone to someone else, applied, in other words, like an external treatment. Management development planned in this spirit, rarely involves the person who requires development in either the diagnosis of the problem or the formulation of the prescription and follow-up. Thus, he tends to find himself playing a largely passive role in important activities concerned with his learning or development.

Mumford (1993) argues the development a contrary approach, commenting that real development takes place, not through necessarily through training, but when the individual sees for himself the need to modify his behaviour, change his attitudes, develop new skills, improve his performance, or prepare himself for a different role. To this end, the rationale that ‘only the learner will learn’ is being recognised more in organisations and by a growing number of management development specialists, tutors and trainers. Mumford (1999) comments that there three main things about managerial learning which ought to impact on our approach in trying to create effective learning environments. All learning is individual, much learning is achieved through interaction with others and most managerial learning occurs in and around the job, with courses sometimes providing splendid injections.

Early Management Approach

The scientific school of management, as epitomised by F. W. Taylor in the USA at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century were based militaristic overtones in the way people were trained to carry out a predetermined sequence of tasks in a predetermined way. The mechanistic view of people’s roles meant that they were ‘trained not developed, much in the way that horses are trained to be compliant followers of orders’. Walton (1999) comments that this saw employees ‘coached on how to interpret rules and procedures, so as to be able to enact official decisions on behalf of the organisation and justify them to external clients.’ This approach, arguably, would see any additional skills learnt acquired, through experiment and accident, often lost within a strict coaching methodology.

It would be easy to criticise such an approach without considering the context in which it was applied. The manufacturing industry of the early 20th Century required the training of a large number of often unskilled workers to carry out ‘narrowly defined tasks’ Walton (1999: 63). The applied managerial approach may have been appropriate for the time. However, unfortunately, the approach was entrenched during the first half of the Century to a degree that it carried over into many organisations well into the Century, even when the organisational context in which it was applied bore no resemblance to the early context in which it was initially initiated.

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Organisations needed to analyse the problem

However, during the last 20 years changes in technology, to name but one factor, have contributed in initiating significant changes in organisational practices and requirements. In turn, this has facilitated a need for organisations fully understand what it requires from its employees. Given the acceptance by many organisations that it is there workforce that is its greatest resource, they are increasingly looking inward to find answers. The changing role of managers in facilitating this is arguably a natural conclusion.

Walton (1999) argues, ‘senior management of organisations have not, until recent years, ...

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