The influence of senior leaders on organisational learning: Insights from the employees’ perspective

Abstract

In the current century, organisations are facing unprecedented changes in their working environments. In order to remain viable, organisations must learn to adapt to the changes they face. We investigate the influence of senior leaders on organisational learning from the employees' perspective. Data were based upon qualitative research utilising a case study of a New Zealand-operated information technology company. By employing an explorative, exploitative and transformative organisational learning framework, and a transactional and transformational model of leadership, the findings contribute empirically to the limited body of research surrounding how senior leaders influence organisational learning. In particular, the findings illustrate the way in which senior leaders employed a transformational leadership approach during explorative and transformative learning, while adopting a transactional leadership style during exploitative learning. Also compelling were participants' comments highlighting how senior leaders had employees emotionally connect and test business ideas and assumptions throughout the learning process.

Thriving in the New Normal: The HR Microfoundations of Capabilities for Business Model Innovation. An Integrated Literature Review

“…Finally, to develop organisational learning, Waddell and Pio () suggest that selective hiring, strategic training and employee participation in decision making were positive influences. Recruiting and training the right employees also ensures that the organisation has the personnel with the potential to acquire new knowledge and skills, tolerate high degrees of uncertainty (such as during a BMI change initiative), and who can adapt to changes quickly and implement the business model.…”

“…Finally, to develop organisational learning, Waddell and Pio (2015) suggest that selective hiring, strategic training and employee participation in decision making were…”

“…Bespoke selection practices to hire individuals with high disposition to learning (Lepak and Snell, 1999;Waddell and Pio, 2015) Training, Learning and Development: Implement leadership development programmes (i.e., meso level) to enable managers to nurture organisational learning through a supportive and safe psychological climate (Cable et al, 2013) Training, Learning and Development: Develop comprehensive learning and development programmes for skills-forthe-future, and double loop learning (Shipton et al,…”

Organizational Learning of Absorptive Capacity and Innovation: Does Leadership Matter?

“…This cross‐learning network accelerates the transfer of learning and accordingly facilitates the learning flow from the individual to the group, which is essential when aiming to achieve firms' facilitation of knowledge assimilation. Therefore, transformative learning process could lead to organizational innovation (Ali and Park, ; Ali et al, ) in the context of absorptive capacity when transformational leadership style is considered (Sun and Anderson, ; Flatten et al, ; Waddell and Pio, ). The above discussion implies that the impact of transformational leadership on innovation is rather indirect, and that the relationship could be mediated by transformative learning process.…”

“…Such refreshing and refining current learning enable transactional leaders play an instrumental role in motivating organizational members to use and take advantage of existing learning stored in the firm (Deichmann and Stam, ). By doing so, transactional leadership not only promotes exploitative learning by motivating organizational members to use and take advantage of existing learning stored in the firm's culture, structure, strategy, procedures, and systems (Vera and Crossan, ; Waldman et al ., 2001), but also facilitates exploitative learning when they impose control over the implementation of knowledge (Waddell and Pio, ). These leaders exercise a maintenance role; and reinforce existing strategies, focus on increasing efficiency in current practices, and communicate the benefits of incremental refinements to existing innovation trajectories.…”