Workplace Learning

Concepts, Measurement and Application

Marianne van Woerkom, Rob Poell, Marianne van Woerkom, Rob Poell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136959875
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Personalmanagement

This edited volume aims to evaluate the promises of workplace learning by addressing the following related questions: What are current developments in theory that informs workplace learning research? How can learning in the workplace be measured? What is the impact of various organizational settings (e.g., team-based work and call centres) on workplace learning? Which are the promising new avenues for research? And which research-based recommendations can be made to boost learning opportunities in various work contexts? The topic is conceptualized as an interaction between the individual and the work context, as a combination of individual and collective processes, as a link between cognition and action, and as a political process.

With a wide array of contributions from academics such as Stephen Billet, Tara Fenwick and Victoria Marsick, this volume will be an important research and reference tool with all those academics and practitioners who are interested in the field of human resource development.

Targeted at researchers, (post) graduate students, and reflective practitioners and managers interested in the area, "Workplace Learning" provides must-read material for anyone wanting to advance the theory, research, and/or practice of learning in the workplace.

1
Introduction

Learning in the Workplace

Marianne Van Woerkom and Rob Poell

This book has arisen out of the need for an update on insights and perspectives on learning in the workplace, a topic that has received attention from both academics and practitioners since the 1990s. It contains 14 chapters based on recent research and practice aimed at an international readership of students, academics, researchers, HRD practitioners, managers, and policymakers interested in human resource development and workplace learning in specific. Most chapters in the book were part of the Workplace Learning stream of the Seventh International Conference on HRD Research and Practice across Europe, held at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, 22–24 May 2006, which was coordinated by the editors.

THE WORKPLACE AS A CONTEXT FOR LEARNING

Whereas 20 years ago learning in the workplace hardly received any attention from academics or practitioners, today workplace learning is a highly popular topic. Although workplace learning is a natural phenomenon that has always existed, the value attached to it has varied in history (see Van der Klink and Streumer 2002). In the Middle Ages workplace learning was the habitual way to develop in the trade. However, in the 20th century the focus changed to learning in schools. From the second half of the 1980s the learning potential of the workplace has been rediscovered, partly as a result of the growing costs and disappointing results of corporate training. In the 1990s many publications were devoted to the advantages and possibilities of workplace learning, in the context of both employee development and vocational education. The emergence of globalization and the knowledge economy, the aging of the workforce, fast technological developments, and different perspectives on the organization of work all strengthen the relevance of workplace learning. In the context of vocational education, dual trajectories (i.e., combining school and work) have become increasingly popular as they contribute to a better match on the labour market.

Studies into the learning potential of the workplace have shown that workplaces can be regarded as strong learning environments due to their opportunities for combining formal and informal learning as well as individual and teamwork, and for exchanges between novices and experts (Billett 1994; Darrah 1995; Velde and Cooper 2000). The workplace is still essential in transferring the ‘mystery’ of work and craft as well as work-related rules and habits to new workers (Engeström 2001). After more than 15 years of interest in workplace learning, however, it is time to draw up the balance sheet: What is the state of affairs regarding theory development on workplace learning, and what are promising new avenues for research? Have 15 years of research on workplace learning enabled us to make this concept more tangible and to identify variations in workplace learning activities and practices? How may the instruments developed be used in practice? To what extent are current work environments, such as team-based work and call centres, favourable for learning and what research-based recommendations can we make to boost the opportunities for learning in these contexts?

AIM AND SCOPE OF THE BOOK

In an attempt to evaluate the promises of workplace learning after more than 15 years of attention to workplace learning, this book addresses such issues by asking and answering the following related questions:

• What are current developments in the body of knowledge informing workplace learning research?

• How can learning in the workplace be operationalized?

• What is the impact of various workplace settings on workplace learning?

Very few books in the field of HRD to date are grounded in evidence-based research. Most HRD books are essentially textbooks and not research-based (although sometimes they are informed by research). HRD as an emerging field has a relatively theoretical knowledge base, which is reflected in the nature of its handbooks (Stewart and McGoldrick 1996; Hargreaves and Jarvis 1998; Wilson 1999, 2005; Walton 1999; Yorks 2004; Sadler-Smith 2006). The few research-driven books on HRD have been on very specific topics, for instance, HRD in the post-command economies of East and Central Europe after the fall of communism (Lee et al. 1996) or HRD in the health and social care sector (Sambrook and Stewart 2007). Stewart et al. (2001) focused on the research process and research design in HRD rather than on research findings, as did Swanson and Holton (1997). In general, therefore, the HRD literature lacks a strong empirical evidence base.

Much the same can be concluded about the topic of workplace learning. Although books in this area have been published as early as 1991 (Watkins) and even 1987 (Marsick), they predominantly focus on theory, how-to-do types of knowledge, and sometimes mere advocacy (Forrester et al. 1995; Garrick 1998; Boud and Garrick 1999; Rainbird et al. 2004). One recent exception was Streumer (2006), which brought together empirical research on the topic based on a set of 2001 conference papers predominantly written by Dutch authors.

The aim of the current volume is, therefore, to provide a comprehensive, up-to-date, and international overview of human resource development research in the broad area of workplace learning. It disseminates the results of a wide range of HRD research in order to contribute to evidence-based practice in the field of workplace learning. It provides a resource to inform teaching, learning, and professional practice. Specifically, its aims are as follows:

• To explore different perspectives on learning in the workplace and assess the various terms and meanings associated with it.

• To describe and evaluate various instruments that have been developed to measure workplace learning.

• To analyze the impact of various work settings on workplace learning, such as teams, action learning programmes, and contexts that are deemed problematic for learning, such as call centres.

• To provide a resource to academics and students researching HRD practice.

• To provide insights and glimpses of good practice for HRD practitioners.

The book is broken into three parts, preceded by this introductory chapter and concluded by one final implications chapter. The first part deals with perspectives on learning in the workplace (four chapters). The second part comprises three chapters about operationalizing learning in the workplace. The third part addresses learning in various workplace settings (five chapters).

OVERVIEW OF THE CHAPTERS

The first part of the book is concerned with theoretical developments in the body of knowledge underlying workplace learning and contains four chapters that present various perspectives on learning in the workplace. Chapter 2 is authored by Stephen Billett and deals with individuals’ active and ongoing construction and remaking of the knowledge required for their work. He proposes a relational interdependence between individual learning and the remaking of the culturally derived work practices that individuals engage in. Neither the social nor the personal contributions alone are sufficient for the learning required to maintain competence throughout working life. The situated social experience is important for understanding the performance requirements of work practices and the processes of learning and remaking practice in work settings. However, personal and person-dependent factors, comprising their cognitive experience, also shape how individuals construe and construct what they encounter through work and throughout working life. It is these active and ongoing processes of knowledge construction through which learning and remaking of cultural practices occur.

The third chapter is written by Tara Fenwick and outlines practice-based conceptions of learning that might be fruitful sources for new directions in HRD’s theories of learning. Fenwick argues that these theories still tend to be dominated by assumptions that learning is an individual process rooted in acquisition. However, in HRD practice learning is increasingly treated as a collective process rooted somehow in dynamic action. The chapter discusses three contemporary conceptions of learning: the participational perspective of situated cognition, the notion of expansion from cultural-historical activity theory, and the constructs of translation and mobilization presented by actor-network theory. While these are not particularly new to HRD, the contribution of Fenwick’s discussion is to bring together these theories in a critical light to highlight selected dynamics that may be useful tools for HRD theory development.

Chapter 4 is authored by Peter Chin and colleagues. In their contribution, they explore several principles that they believe to be central to research on workplace learning. Research on workplace learning should have a broad focus and include the range from students in work-based education programs to adult workers, and the range from novice to proficient workers. The research is especially productive if it is aimed at inexperienced adult workers and learners in work-based education because they have not developed smoothly executable practices. The research needs to be attentive to all of the commonplaces of learning—learners, teachers, content, milieu— and should be inclusive with a focus on promoting learning for at-risk and exceptional learners. Research on workplace learning needs to document how the characteristics of the workplace fit the learner’s individual needs, especially for vulnerable learners. Further, the authors argue that the complexities of workplace learning commend the development of populations of rich case studies as a research approach.

The fifth chapter is written by Paul Tosey with co-authors and deals with Gregory Bateson’s framework of ‘levels of learning’, which has influenced thinking about workplace learning as well as thinking about learning in other contexts (e.g., higher education). However, in their opinion Bateson’s framework is routinely misconstrued and misrepresented, meaning that its potential to synthesize a variety of ideas about ‘learning to learn’ and to provide an integrative view of individual and organizational learning is missed. The chapter aims to describe Bateson’s framework and its origins and highlight ways in which literature misconstrues the framework, referring to the intersecting fields of education, management learning, organizational learning, and transformative learning. Furthermore, the chapter provides an alternative understanding of Bateson’s model, highlighting the framework as a means of indicating multiple possibilities of learning from experience, and it identifies and discusses implications for workplace learning.

The second part in the book contains three chapters addressing recent developments in operationalizing learning activities in the workplace. This part starts with a contribution about antecedents of nurses’ on-the-job learning behaviour by Marjolein Berings and colleagues (Chapter 6). This contribution discusses which elements of the famous Demand-Control-Support model developed by Karasek and Theorell (1990) influence the different types of actual on-the-job learning activities conducted by registered nurses. On the basis of a sample of 372 registered nurses working in different departments of 13 general hospitals in the Netherlands, the authors conclude that different types of learning are influenced differently by the psychological work conditions, with most effects for learning through talking with others. The role of the supervisor appeared to be extremely important, through providing sufficient job control and social support. Furthermore, Berings found that intrinsic work motivation plays an important direct role in on-the-job learning behaviour and also mediates key parts of the impact that the psychosocial work environment has on on-the-job learning.

Individual and organizational learning processes are highly contingent upon how individual workers gather information from their internal and external workplace contexts. Chapter 7 is written by Yu-Lin Wang and Andrea Ellinger and describes the development of an instrument to assess information acquisition activities. The chapter discusses the development of a new measure to assess internal and external information acquisition activities, drawing upon Dixon’s (1992) conceptualization of information acquisition, which has been identified as a construct of organizational learning. The findings from the validation process demonstrate that the factors empirically derived from factor analysis mostly correspond to Dixon’s framework. This newly developed instrument can be a useful tool in assessing how individuals obtain information as part of their informal workplace learning. It also represents the operationalization of one of the constructs that can advance our understanding of organizational learning, which has been hampered by a lack of available measurement tools.

Mistakes can provide important opportunities for workplace learning. Chapter 8 is authored by Johannes Bauer and Regina Mulder and discusses the development of an instrument that measures learning from errors at work. The authors argue that while there are strong traditions of research on human error and safety management—focusing primarily on organizational learning—there are only a few studies on how and under which circumstances individuals learn from errors encountered in a naturalistic work context. A special problem is how to investigate the engagement in learning activities after an error, because errors are unpredictable events. The authors introduce a conceptualization of learning from errors at work, which is based on theories of experiential learning at work and provides the basis for their instrument. Further, they present findings from a pilot study and from a larger study in nursing that aimed to test the feasibility of their approach. They conclude that learning from errors can be measured by asking workers about activities that they engage in after an error in order to analyze causes and to develop strategies for preventing similar errors in the future. Also, they argue that questions about the engagement in error-related learning activities should be based upon concrete error cases that represent a specific type of error, because different types of errors offer a different potential for learning.

The third part deals with learning in various workplace settings and contains five chapters. Besides workplace learning taking place in the context of organized programmes, it is also a process that simply emerges from the interaction between individual and the workplace setting. Therefore, we need to develop an insight into which workplace characteristics influence workplace learning. This part considers the implications that various workplace settings may have for employee learning. One specific type of setting is that of team-based structures, in which teams rather than individuals are responsible for getting the job done. This implies that by working together, employees can develop both individual and collective competencies in a process of exchanging information, advice, feedback, and different perspectives. Chapter 9 is written by Marloes Van Engen and Marianne Van Woerkom and deals with learning in the setting of work teams. They argue that in work teams the knowledge and skills of various team members will always differ to a certain extent as a result of their work experience and education. On the one hand this diversity in expertise in the team may have a positive effect on team learning and team performance, because when relevant expertise is brought together this may enhance the quality of decisions and actions. However, on the other hand differences among team members may also result in social categorization processes or in similarity attraction processes leading to professional rivalry, emotional conflict, and other dysfunctional affective processes in the team. On the basis of a survey among 624 respondents, working in 88 teams in seven different organizations, they conclude that the benefits of expertise diversity are greater than the costs. If team members report that they see differences in expertise in their team, they perceive their team as learning more, and consequently as performing better, and as being more innovative.

Workplace learning may also take place in project contexts. Chapter 10, by Rob Poell and co-authors, deals with two perspectives on project-based learning in work contexts, the first one being the critical-pragmatist perspective and the second the actor-network perspective. Despite their conceptual similarities, they are based on different classifications; the dominant actor is what differentiates learning projects in the actor-netw...