Editorial

Citation

Kekäle, T. and Cervai, S. (2015), "Editorial", Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 27 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/JWL-08-2015-0056

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Workplace Learning, Volume 27, Issue 7

For the first time in our career as the Editors of Journal of Workplace Learning, we have been asked to fine-tune our editorial line. This happened within the upgrading of Emerald website for its journals. In that process, we were asked to check, expand and prune the list of keywords for our Journal. This had us think again what research we would like to publish, and what we are not. Basically, as we are quite simple people, our idea when pondering on the renewed list of keywords was the same as when we took over the publication: we are about Workplace Learning.

Sometimes, we get manuscripts about career counselling and other more general HR themes. While these articles may be well-written and timely, we politely turn them down. Training, coaching, learning and knowledge at workplace: these are the key ingredients of our part of the world of science. This leads to another interesting division on what workplaces the learning takes place in. Most workplaces are easy to decide upon, but educational organizations are not always so. We have decided that if the students/learners learn at school, then it is generally not us; if the teachers, or other staff, learn at their workplace (school), then we are interested. Sometimes, studies where school students learn at workplaces outside school, or lab tests on workplace learning theories on student populations, may include an interesting point, and accept it for review, but we at Emerald have also sister publications for such learning. If in doubt of the suitability of your manuscript to our aims, send the manuscript in; we may be able to redirect it to the correct journal.

This issue is about the core of our concept: team and cultural learning, coaching, impact of training. The first article in line is about measuring team learning behaviours, by Elisabeth Raes. While a majority of earlier studies on this topic focus on perceptions of team members about the occurrence of team learning behaviours, Raes attempts in this research to observe the real behaviours. Studying audio material from team problem-solving, the method indeed was successful in studying several interesting team behaviours, but also raised several questions in developing such studies, the most important being the need to define when an activity in a team (e.g. one member of a team “triggering” a new way of approaching a problem) is team learning activity and when it is individual learning activity. From the point of view of validity, this article is recommended reading for anybody aiming at conducting team learning research.

The second article, by Helle Alrø, introduces an approach to group coaching, where one or more coaches facilitate the group conversation about common challenges in a dialogic way. Based on Martin Buber’s views on dialogue, and Isaacs’ “thinking together” view on organizational learning, they have developed principles of dialogic group coaching, that they explain and illustrate further in this article. However, they conclude that “dialectic group coaching is not a technique that can be learned by using a set of tools”; every coach should rely on his/her own theoretical background and adapt the principles to the situations they face.

Our own research work has touched many different aspects of culture change as learning, and thus we have read somewhat in depth the articles and books concerning the development of safety culture, for example, in air traffic, in shipping and within different emergency teams. The Italian research team of Carlo Ripamonti and Giuseppe Scaratti present here an article on safety learning and organizational contradictions, which picked our interest due to its ethnographic approach. The paper explores 28 employees’ narrated accounts of how safety rules are enacted or infringed while living and working in the field in a transshipment port. They found that workgroups had developed their own safety routines and protective strategies to face workplace hazards. Such divergent conducts were diffused among the workers during the development of their work and cultural identity. This further points out the importance of the informal organization as a platform for learning.

Finally, this issue contains a piece by Abdul Rahim Zumrah on understanding training impact, as studied in a Malaysian public service context. Through his thorough survey of 222 public service workers on a training course, 222 supervisors to these persons and 624 of the training participants’ colleagues, he finds that transfer of training results are a significant mechanism to enhance the impact of training on employees’ performance (service quality). In more detail, the mechanism of “social exchange approach” is described in the findings Chapter as follows:

[…] employees perceive the support from their organization (they have been sponsored to attend training programs by organization), then feel an obligation to engage in behaviors that benefit the organization (transfer the training outcomes to the workplace) and are also willing to expend more effort to fulfill their organizational goals (delivering quality service to organization’s customers).

This issue is a small medley of what our newly fine-tuned Editorial Line might be about. Be inspired and intrigued, and keep the manuscripts on Workplace Learning coming in.

Tauno Kekäle

Editor, Vaasa University of Applied Science, Vaasa, Finland

Sara Cervai

Editor, University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy