Date of Submission

8-16-2020

Document Type

OIP

Degree

Doctor of Education

Department

Education

Keywords

Organizational learning, Learning engagement, Team leadership, Authentic leadership, Team learning, Community of Practice

Abstract

The ability of an organization to effectively learn and apply knowledge not only equates with highly agile performance, it is increasingly important to surviving in a knowledge based economy. Organizational learning has been widely popularized in recent decades, however defining, coordinating, and maximizing this collective learning capability within organizations remains challenging. In part this difficulty may lie in conflicted views about the purposes of learning and who it benefits, varied ways in which learning or leading it can happen, and most importantly in employee’s different motivations to engage in learning at all. This plan examines organizational learning engagement and targets changes and a solution to necessarily improve this active, immersive participation in learning. Changes required within the organization being examined include a need to balance a performance goal and managerial control emphasis over OL with a more explorative, employee centric, collaborative, learning growth strategy. Using team and authentic leadership in concert with Kotter’s model and emergent change principles, this improvement plan forwards a community of practice engagement solution and means to implement, monitor and evaluate it. Informally led communities of practice embody engaged organizational learning, accomplished through socialized relational exchange, knowledge sharing, and the disseminated production-use of knowledge artifacts. This proposed solution aims to integrate into existing bureaucratic structure of the organization and provide synergistic benefit to managerial practices already supporting organizational learning. The community of practice solution is presented as a small increment change helping lay foundations for more ambitious visions of a strongly supported learning culture emphasizing high engagement at the organization.

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