Vicarious Learning in Organizations
Description
To advance the study of how individuals learn through their interactions with others, Professor Myers has adopted a vicarious learning theory lens. Vicarious learning allows individuals to learn from the outcomes of others’ experiences, rather than solely their own actions, benefiting from not having to “reinvent the wheel.”
Despite the importance of vicarious learning, our understanding of the interpersonal interactions underlying it is still limited. Most studies of vicarious learning have been conducted at the organization level of analysis, focusing on the diffusion of knowledge through formal interunit channels and organizational ties. Studies that do explore individual-level vicarious learning tend to characterize it simplistically as a one-way process in which a learner passively observes and attempts to replicate the actions of a “model.”
Professor Myers’s research in this area examines actual interactions that occur between individuals in the workplace. This work articulates novel discursive mechanisms, emergent organizing processes, and reciprocal knowledge sharing practices, highlighting the ways in which the relational context of work influences individual learning to enable collective performance.
In one recent paper, integrating theories of experiential learning and symbolic interactionism, Professor Myers offers a theoretical account of coactive vicarious learning, capturing these coconstructed, interpersonal learning interactions, and argues that they lead to growth in individual and relational capacity for learning.
Another paper inductively examines the organizing processes used to promote vicarious learning in two air medical transport teams, advancing a view of vicarious learning as resulting not solely from formal structures (such as personnel rotation or knowledge management interfaces), but rather as an emergently organized phenomenon, driven by individuals’ actions as well as the structures they create.
A third paper uses a network-based study to examine what leads individuals to create two-way vicarious learning relationships (in contrast to the dominant view of these relationships as one-way knowledge transfer), and explores the impact of different distributions of these reciprocal relationships on team learning and performance.