That Others May Learn: Three Views on Vicarious Learning in Organizations.

Abstract

Vicarious learning, the process by which an individual learns from another’s experience, has long been recognized as a source of development and performance improvement in organizations, at both individual and collective levels. Yet existing perspectives on this critical learning process have been fairly limited, typically casting vicarious learning as a simple process of observation and imitation, enabled by formal organizational knowledge-transfer conduits. Largely absent from prior approaches is a consideration of the interpersonal dynamics underlying vicarious learning, leaving unexplored important questions related to 1) the actual behaviors unfolding when individuals interact to learn from one another’s experience, 2) how people coordinate efforts to enact and facilitate these vicarious learning interactions, and 3) the performance impact of different patterns of engagement in these interactions. In this dissertation, I advance a perspective on vicarious learning that views it as relationally co-created, emergently organized, and dyadically reciprocal, exploring the issues identified above in three distinct chapters. First, I present a theoretical model of what I term coactive vicarious learning, integrating theories of experiential learning and symbolic interactionism to articulate a co-construction process of vicarious learning, arising from individuals’ discussion and shared meaning-making. I unpack the antecedents and underlying behaviors of these discursive vicarious learning interactions, and theorize that they not only increase individuals’ knowledge, but also build individual and relational capacity for future learning. Second, I present a qualitative study of how these vicarious learning interactions manifest at work, inductively exploring the organizing processes used to facilitate vicarious learning in air medical transport teams. I advance a view of vicarious learning not as wholly determined by formal structures, but rather as an emergently organized phenomenon, enacted through interpersonal storytelling and facilitated by the coalescence of informal practices and formal structures. Third, I present a quantitative examination of different distributions of vicarious learning in work teams. Specifically, I examine what leads individuals to engage in reciprocal vicarious learning relationships (where each individual learns from the other, in contrast to the prevailing view of vicarious learning as one-way information transfer) and demonstrate that greater reciprocation of vicarious learning within a team enhances performance.