LEADING THOUGHTS

C.K Prahalad gave us core competencies, the bottom of the pyramid, constrained innovation, and a few other mind-bending management theories. Until his dying days, he believed that individuals, not institutions, were central. Institutions are merely “different ways of combining skills and capabilities of the moment.” Go to article

Learning and development pros have been getting an easy ride when it comes to showing the business value of training. Lame surveys no longer cut it. Fortunately, the Boys & Girls Clubs of America can show how to tie training to key business performance metrics. Go to article (registration required)

Beefy bouncers at Manhattan nightclubs can tell us a thing or two about status cues and how rewards are doled out. I’ll let you connect the dots to organizational life. Go to article

If it takes a village to raise a child, then perhaps it takes co-workers to help trainees shine.

Management development experts have long known that organizations get the most out of their training dollars when employees are supported before, during, and after training. Few organizations, however, actually follow this advice.

Models of training effectiveness focus on program design, trainee characteristics, and workplace environment as the key factors that determine transfer of learning. By contrast, Harry J. Martin (Cleveland State University) wanted to study the context in which employees apply and transfer the knowledge and skills learned, specifically the role of workplace climate and peer support.

(Workplace climate includes factors such as adequate resources, cues that remind trainees of what they have learned, opportunities to apply skills, barriers and constraints to transfer, and consequences for using training on the job.)

FACTOID: It is estimated that only 10 to 40 percent of learning transfers to the job.

Martin focused on 237 managers of a manufacturing company in the midwest U.S. who completed a comprehensive training program. He devised a global measure of workplace climate for each of the 12 divisions in which the employees worked and used performance ratings of the participants to measure the level of training transfer.

Martin found that trainees in a division with a more favorable climate and those enjoying greater peer support showed greater improvement. Even better, in terms of transferring learnings, peer support overcame or lessened the effects of a negative office environment.

“The results of this study suggest that follow-up programs should be designed to address both the immediate and general organizational environments,” Martin reports in Human Resource Development Quarterly. “Care must be taken to help ensure that peers and immediate supervisors help trainees put the skills to work. Co-workers could provide general encouragement or be involved in more structured activities such as the peer meetings employed in this study.”

“Workplace Climate and Peer Support as Determinants of Training Transfer,” by Harry J. Martin; Human Resource Development Quarterly (Vol. 21 No. 1 Spring 2010; pp. 87-104)

photo credit: gritphilm

When it comes to developing leaders of the future, North America’s business schools fail to walk the talk, says Stanford University’s Jeffrey Pfeffer.

A high-profile educator, thinker, and author, Pfeffer says business schools offer plenty of experiential activities, leadership labs, self-assessments, and group project work. The problem, he writes in a paper, is that “there is little peer-reviewed research evaluating such efforts and the available, albeit limited, evidence is almost completely inconsistent with the idea that business schools are having positive effects on the development of student values and attitudes. . .”

Pfeffer offers a number of research findings as indirect evidence. For example, a recent study by The Aspen Institute found that business school students’ confidence in their ability to manage values-based conflicts at work fell throughout their time in the program, as did the proportion of people agreeing that they had opportunities to practice ethical decision-making as part of their MBA. The survey also showed that the importance students placed on “having a positive impact on society” decreased the longer students were in an MBA program.

The problem, Pfeffer writes, is that leadership development initiatives are not core activities of business schools. He says they are weakly tied to the rest of the curriculum, frequently staffed by non-tenure track instructors, and offered outside regular class times.

These are Pfeffer’s suggestions for how business schools can get serious about leadership development:

Measure using the right criteria. “Schools need to measure not just the starting salaries of their graduates but outcomes that are proximately related to their stated mission of leadership development. Based on the results of such measurements, schools need to learn what seems to working well and what is working less well and adjust their activities accordingly.”

Change the marketing message. “Schools should emphasize leadership development in their marketing to prospective students and in how they brand themselves. Organizational identities matter and if leadership development is a critical part of the mission of business schools, it needs to be a more central part of the schools’ identity.”

Evaluate faculty with an emphasis on leadership development. “While not all faculty and all courses need to be held accountable for accomplishing the schools’ stated mission of leadership development, at least some of the evaluation of research and teaching ought to incorporate this objective.”

Leadership Development in Business Schools: An Agenda for Change, by Jeffrey Pfeffer; Graduate School of Business Stanford University (Research Paper No. 2016, February 2009)

Email me for a copy of this paper: Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com

photo credit: eschipul

Labour relations in North America’s school systems can be highly political, brutish, blamestorming affairs. Always in the middle are the hapless students who are often used as pawns.

Critics says collective bargaining raises the cost of education, blocks reform, protects incompetent teachers, and increases we-they tensions. Union supporters say bargaining empowers teachers and increases their input in policy decisions. But when you get right down to it, does collective bargaining have any impact on the academic performance of students?

It is a brave research question posed by Robert Carini of University of Louisville, Kentucky. In the Journal of Collective Negotiations, Carini writes that the “thin body of research” linking collective bargaining with academic outcomes is inconclusive and of “widely varying quality.”

As Carini points out, studies on bargaining often analyze only math gains or de-emphasize reading gains by combining math and reading gains into a composite score. In contrast, he used data from the U.S. National Education Longitudinal Study to see whether student gains on standardized math, reading, science, and history tests differed for students in public schools with and without collective bargaining.

His conclusion: collective bargaining is not negatively related to student achievement. Students in schools with and without collective bargaining showed comparable changes in
educational expectations between the eighth and tenth grades.

“Although there is mounting evidence that bargaining shapes the social organization of schools, these effects taken together do not appear to depress student achievement,” Carini writes. “There is evidence that teacher unions are more willing to be at the vanguard of reform than in the past, yet the degree to which unions oppose and effectively block reforms counter to their interests is still open to debate.”

Is Collective Bargaining Detrimental to Student Achievement? Evidence from a National Study; by Robert M. Carini; Journal of Collective Negotiations (2008, vol. 32 [3], 215-235)

Email me for a copy of this paper: Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com

photo credit: Old Sarge