AOM Scholars On... Employee Training and Development to Foster Workforce Productivity

Held 23 October 2024

In the 15^th installment of AOM Scholars On… experts provide insights and solutions for employee development and satisfaction in today’s workplaces, including the incorporation of new technologies like generative AI.

View the full recording of the panel.

Kevin Kniffin, assistant professor of management and organizations at Cornell University moderated a discussion among panelists Catherine Collins of UNSW Sydney, Carol Kulik of the University of South Australia and Christopher Myers of Johns Hopkins University on how organizations can effectively facilitate growth, development and upskilling in this new world of work, ultimately resulting in more fulfilled and productive employees.

Research-based Insights:

• Managers critical role: Carol Kulik stresses the importance of line managers in fostering and creating space for employees to pursue development and training opportunities, including providing support to employees on how to apply what they have learned to the workplace. Discussants stress the importance of providing work-specific context in development opportunities.
• Informal learning in hybrid environments: Chris Myers shared why organizations need to more thoughtfully cultivate informal learning interactions and how workflows can be structured in a hybrid working environment to incorporate these types of interactions. For example, organizations can incorporate designated reflection and debriefing time following a client call on Zoom as well as make better use of the in-person time by focusing on learning and development activities. 
• Formal versus informal training: Catherine Collins references a recent Academy of Management Discoveries article about the interplay between formal and informal learning and discusses that the amplification of informal training opportunities, such as clinical rotations in the medical field, fostered performance readiness behaviors in the experimental group. This demonstrates an opportunity for organizations to explore how to incorporate more informal learning opportunities.

Panel Soundbites:

• Catherine Collins on balancing innovation and productivity, “When ambidexterity is embedded in strategy, it can drive organizational performance, but when we are trying to do these two things at once – both performance and innovation – the employee outcomes do suffer. Whilst productivity is important, we need to deliberately design time for these growth and innovation opportunities because without deliberately embedding that within our workloads, we see the performance paradox play out.”
• Carol Kulik on social relationships and meaningful work: “The critical issue in any discussion about purpose or meaning relates to social relationships. The approach I encourage organizations to take would be to recognize how critical those relationships are in continually signaling to an employee what is important in the organization, why you’re trying to learn those skills, and here’s who’s going to benefit from you developing them.”

• Chris Myers on AI’s potential role in learning: “When it comes to kinds of knowledge management processes, there’s so much that can’t be documented and written down that just resides in people’s heads within the organization. But could AI be used to help us navigate that landscape of who knows what within the organization? That’s something I think generative AI is set up to help us do because it can get into more of that underlying logic rather than just the technical explicit skill set.
• Kevin Kniffin on encouraging continuous learning: “We’ve all seen schools and universities starting to adopt these ‘lifelong learning’ or ‘continuous learning’ slogans, which is a ripe area for more systemic investigation.”

Visit AOM's Subject Matter Expert page for additional information and contact aom@press.org to request access to the full research or arrange interviews with the scholars. 

Panel Moderator

Kevin Kniffin, Cornell University

Kevin Kniffin leads two active streams of research that focus on Teams and Leadership. Through studies of athletic and scientific teams, Kevin has developed two lines of investigation that utilize data from popular and important model domains. More generally, he has studied the relevance of leadership across a variety of organizational contexts. He has contributed original research to publications including American Psychologist, the Journal of Organizational Behavior, and The Leadership Quarterly. Kevin's research to study academic career paths has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and his work has been featured by outlets including Harvard Business Review and the New York Times. Kevin won the Established Researcher Award in 2019 from the Institute for Research on Innovation & Science (IRIS) and is an incoming Editorial Board Member for Academy of Management Discoveries for 2021-2023.

In the classroom, Kevin enjoys meeting students where they are by engaging their experiences in the pursuit of studying evidence-based principles of individual and organizational behavior. Winner of the Innovative Teacher Award from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) in 2020, Kevin employs an interdisciplinary approach to both Organizational Behavior (AEM 3245/6245) and Leadership and Management in Sports (AEM 3320/6325). Kevin has presented Ten Bottom-Line Lessons from the Big Leagues as the University's Faculty Homecoming Speaker (2016) and speaks regularly for alumni, governmental, and business organizations.

Panelist

Catherine Collins, UNSW Sydney

Catherine Collins is an Associate Professor at UNSW Sydney’s Business School in the School of Management and Governance.

Catherine researches how to develop and sustain team effectiveness. Her research examines how these changes are created from individuals’ proactivity, team processes, work design, organizational structures and systems. Her recent work focuses on how organizational ambidexterity – balancing the tension of coordination across business units for efficiency alongside front line flexibility for innovation and engagement – is needed for teams to thrive.

Her other research interests include seeking to understand why managers do (or don’t!) use research findings (i.e., evidence-based management) as well as employee well-being. Her applied research in organizations has attracted more than $1M of research funding and is published in top tier journals.

Her research has been featured in books including, The Oxford Handbook of Uncertainty Management in Work Organizations and Coaching Researched: A Coaching Psychology Reader for Practitioners and Researchers.

Panelist

Carol Kulik, University of South Australia

Carol T. Kulik is a Bradley Distinguished Professor of Human Resource Management at the University of South Australia (UniSA Business) and a senior researcher at UniSA’s Centre for Workplace Excellence.

Carol's research focuses on the effective management of workforce diversity, with a particular emphasis on gender and age. Current projects are investigating strategies for closing the gender pay gap, motivating organizations to become gender equality frontrunners, and empowering employees to negotiate better working arrangements in the next normal.

Her book, Human Resources for the non-HR Manager, makes research on human resource management accessible to line managers with no formal training in human resources.

Panelist

Christopher Myers, Johns Hopkins University

Christopher G. Myers is an Associate Professor of Management and Organization and the founding Faculty Director of the Center for Innovative Leadership at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. He also holds a Joint Appointment in Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

His research and teaching focus on individual learning, leadership development, and innovation, with particular attention to how people learn vicariously and share knowledge in health care organizations and other knowledge-intensive work environments. He has received a variety of awards and honors for his research and teaching, including being named by Poets & Quants as one of the top 40 business school professors under 40 world-wide.

Prior to joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins University, Chris was an Assistant Professor at the Harvard Business School and received his PhD in management and organizations from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.