Workplace Climate Influences on the Prospects of Workplace Learning Within Organizational Contexts

The transformation of our economy from an industrial into a knowledge economy changed every aspect of business dynamics and competitive advantage. Workplace climate and leadership exert a major influence in fomenting an environment that fosters reflective skills and workplace learning, key factors for knowledge productivity and competitive advantage to take place. The present thesis examines the relationship between workplace climate and workplace leaning and investigates the predictive power of leadership with regards to reflective skills. The research consisted of a comparative study of two organizations’ workplace climate and workplace learning (Company A, N= 32; Company B, N=34), measured with the “Workplace Climate Questionnaire” and the “Knowledge Productivity Survey”, respectively. Our empirical results show that workplace climate and workplace learning are indeed related; however our expectation of confirming that leadership exerts an influence on reflective skills was not...Show moreThe transformation of our economy from an industrial into a knowledge economy changed every aspect of business dynamics and competitive advantage. Workplace climate and leadership exert a major influence in fomenting an environment that fosters reflective skills and workplace learning, key factors for knowledge productivity and competitive advantage to take place. The present thesis examines the relationship between workplace climate and workplace leaning and investigates the predictive power of leadership with regards to reflective skills. The research consisted of a comparative study of two organizations’ workplace climate and workplace learning (Company A, N= 32; Company B, N=34), measured with the “Workplace Climate Questionnaire” and the “Knowledge Productivity Survey”, respectively. Our empirical results show that workplace climate and workplace learning are indeed related; however our expectation of confirming that leadership exerts an influence on reflective skills was not supported. These findings may suggest that, in the current economic context outlined by the latest global economic crisis featured by downsizing, leadership may not be the prevailing influencing factor with regards to reflective skills and workplace learning, but other workplace climate features such as workload. This cue indicates that this subject matter may have evolved since the advent of the knowledge economy and new variables come into play. We recommend the replication of this study with knowledge intensive organizations and with a larger sample composed by respondents being knowledge workers in order to verify the current results, and also suggest conducting it adopting workload as independent variable in order to investigate this new hypothesis.Show less

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Workplace Climate Influences on the Prospects of Workplace Learning Within Organizational Contexts