TOPIC: FUNDAMENTAL LEADERSHIP

Fundamental Leadership



Fundamental Leadership

Introduction

Research interests on individual learning in the management literature have generally focused on how employees acquire technical job knowledge and declarative and procedural information about their organizations. However, complex changes in the nature of work over the past two decades have resulted in the need for employees to develop the capacity for continuous learning (Mirvis & Hall, 1996). It is no longer sufficient to examine employee learning as it relates to a particular job or role within a specific context.

Subject Matter

In the adult learning literature, significant learning involves personal development and change in behavior, attitudes, or even the dispositions of the learner (Rogers, 1983). Personal development is characterized by transformations in how we see ourselves in relation to others and includes sophisticated interpersonal skills (Merriam & Heuer, 1996). Such development is an essential element of learning how to learn, which results in employability and job security for employees and competitive advantage for organizations (Ellinger, 2004; Hall, 2002).

To further clarify the distinctions among the types of learning employees are experiencing in the workplace, we introduce a 2 × 2 typology in Figure 4.1 based on Hall's (2002) dimensions of career effectiveness. In Hall's model, four types of career effectiveness were delineated based on a task focus versus self and personal development focus in conjunction with short-term versus long-term time orientation. A focus on task challenges in the short term was associated with career effectiveness in job performance. A task challenge focus over the long term was associated with adaptability. Personal development in the short term was associated with career effectiveness (in the form of job attitudes), and a focus on personal development in the long term was associated with career identity. Hall (2002) utilized these dimensions to describe different career effectiveness outcomes.

We apply the same two dimensions of task/personal focus and short-term/ long-term time orientation to differentiate four types of learning outcomes in mentoring relationships. In addition, we associate a short-term time orientation with context-specific learning, which refers to the type of learning that is tied to a specific job or role in an organization. In contrast, a long-term time orientation is characterized as context-free because the learning can be generalized or utilized across organizational boundaries. A learning focus on how to perform tasks associated with a role in a specific organizational context (short-term orientation) results in organizational socialization as a learning outcome. Socialization is broadly defined as information acquisition about various aspects of organizational life, such as performance standards, important people in the organization, organization goals and values, and jargon (Bauer, Morrison, & Callister, 1998; Chao, O'Leary-Kelly, Wolf, Klein, & Gardner, 1994). A learning focus on tasks associated with a role that applies to various organizational contexts over time represents professional socialization (see Chao, Chapter 7, this volume). This is learning about the broader set of expectations, skills, behaviors, and performance demands associated with a particular profession.

Personal development in the short term, meaning that the personal learning is gained in a specific organizational context, is ...