The use of organizational stories as a learning tool toward the complexification of knowledge

Christy A Armentrout-Brazee, Purdue University

Abstract

Organizational members face greater complexity in today's work environments. Traditionally, employee training programs have been used to enable employees to adapt to organizational change and uncertainty. However, this approach has largely failed to promote learning that either allows for flexibility in application or corresponds to the actual experiences of employees. In this dissertation project an alternative approach, learning through the use of organizational stories, was explored using complexity theory to better understand how employees create complexified understandings of organizational safety issues. Two components of complexity theory were investigated. First, support for the claim that organizational stories are complex adaptive systems was found by examining how stories displayed the five key characteristics of complex adaptive systems (i.e., interdependence, embeddedness, dynamism, nonlinearity, and adaptation). Second, organizational stories were also found to exhibit the process of self-organization. Support was demonstrated through the identification of several simple rules that guided storytelling and in that organizational stories exhibited both the properties (i.e., aggregation, nonlinearity, flows, and diversity) and mechanisms (i.e., tagging, building blocks, and internal models) of self-organizing systems. To arrive at these findings, an interpretive study was conducted using focus groups and interviews with a hangar bay swing shift crew at a major airline's heavy maintenance facility. These employees, representing positions throughout the hierarchy, were asked to share safety-related stories they had heard or told in their work environment. The researcher also solicited the participants' views regarding the utility and effectiveness of safety-related stories in conveying safety information compared to more traditional communication methods (e.g., policies, procedures, operating manuals, posters). Implications regarding how organizational members could benefit from reframing how they view the use of safety-related stories in the work environment and how organizational stories could enhance organizational training efforts were developed.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Mattson, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Communication|Management

Off-Campus Purdue Users:
To access this dissertation, please log in to our
proxy server
.

Share

COinS