Generative learning management. Leadership that influence market-based generative learning in any organization (UH)

What kind of leadership will influence market-based generative learning in any organization? I tried to answer that question in my doctoral theis. The work was based on my experience as a performance coach, as well as four thesis's in Business administration and Psychology. Today's leadership emphasizes transformational leadership. I included that framework when I developed the leadership-model, which has a two-factor structure: goal-assignment, and decentralization of decision making of development of strategies to attain the goal. The criteria is social creativity. The statistical analysis confirmed the model. 4 pages.

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What kind of leadership will influence market-based generative learning in any organization?

I tried to answer that question in my doctoral thesis. Send me an e-mail and I give you a copy of the thesis for free!.

The work with the thesis was based on my experience as a performance coach and two bachelor and two master's thesis's in psychology and Organizational Development (OD).

In OD I investigated how goal-setting influence adaptive and generative learning processes of a direct-sales organizational. The method was qualitative, using observations and interviews (Österberg, 2001b).

Parallel to that I investigated how Facial expressions affect emotions in the context of sport psychology. It proved that emotions mediated the instructions from the coach to athlete relation. The method was experimental design (Österberg, 2001b).

That followed by a master's thesis in organizational development, continuing my work on organizational learning. Here I implement a three-dimensional structure of intentional prospects, communication style, and learning. The method was quantitative (Österberg, 2002).

After that I wrote my masters thesis in social psychology, assessing how children's emotional relation to their parents influenced their emotional and social adjustment as well as cognitive development. The method was quantitative (Österberg, 2004 a).

Today, leadership research emphasize on Transformational leadership (TL):

where a leader works with teams to identify needed change, creating a vision to guide the change through inspiration, and executing the change in tandem with committed members of a group. But TL still has some ambiguity that makes several interpretations possible.

My take on leadership style was to take Transformational and transactional leadership as a starting point, but narrow it to fit the functions of the mind (Österberg, 2004). Besides Goal-setting (Locke & Latham, 2002) and Symbolic convergence (Bormann, 1985), the thesis include theories about parallel distributed processing (Lord and Maher, 1991; McClelland and Rumelhert, 1985) as well as epistemological bridging between declarative organizational knowledge and non-declarative knowing (Cook and Brown, 1999).

Research demonstrates that things like surprise and challenge trigger a biochemical process - releasing dopamine from the reward system to the hippocampus, leading to experience psychologists call motivation - the driver of behavior - or curiosity - the impulse to explore which explains performance, learning, and behavior (Buck, 1985; Fenke & Schutze, 2008 Locke & Latham, 2002).

This boiled down to a interdisciplinary two-factor model about leadership style to influence market-based generative learning within organizations. Based on my previous work I hypothesized that leader should assign goal-setting to the organization and then decentralize decision making processes to the level of operations. (Österberg, 2004).

Then came another evolution when I transided to put less weight on organizational development and more on psychology. Generative learning was replaced with creativity. The rational for doing so was two-folded:

first, I was an autodidact psychologist. That means that throughout my career as a performance coach, I relied heavily on prospective thinking, especially goal-setting.

Second, the focus of my thesis's was originally generative learning. But I used Senge (1990) definition of generative learning which was based on creativity. It all made sense to change from generative learning to creativity.

Its important to remember that there are other concept that resemble generative learning and creativity, for example, entrepreneurial cognition (Mitchell et al. 2002).

The antecedent to all are the minds general ability to simulate abstractions forward in time (Gilbert and Wilson, 2007; Szpunar et al. 2014), that emerges some 70 000 years ago (Ambrose, 2010; Pringle, 2016; Schacter and Addis, 2007).

The ability to simulate abstractions forward in time us part of something called the executive functions which also include goal-setting and planning (Diamond, 2013).

Executive functions operate in the prefrontal cortex which started to expand some 3.6 - 2.6 million years before the present when our ancestors started to put animal source food on their plates (Aiello and Wheeler, 1995; Mann, 2018; Pobiner, 2016).

The development of their brains took at least three leaps, manifesting the emergens of social and spatial cognition, symbolic thing as well as language and theory of mind (Coolidge and Wynn, 2018).

Some 90 - 60 000 years ago they started to network with each other, and that 'rewired' their brains to use prospective thinking to a greater extent (Pringle, 2016).

I set out to test the internal consistency of my hypothetical two-dimensional model for leadership style, and also, its association to the criteria - social creativity (or generative learning, or entrepreneurial cognition). The result confirmed my hypothesis (Österberg, 2012).

Epilog.

A prominent example of how to apply this leadership style is John F Kennedy's (1917-1963) two statement's about sending a man to the moon and returning him safely to earth at the end of the decade (the 1960s). Kennedy used framing to alter the prospect, first for the congress to get funding. Second, to the american people.

"Everything you needed to know was there" ... "a great advantage when a goal can be stated in a way that they are not ambiguous" (Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, ~1.5 minutes into the video).

Kennedy couldn't communicate one-on-one with 120 million Americans, neither could he control their actions. He could only assign a prospect challenging enough to ignite their motivation for performance, learning, and creativity for problem-solving. Charles Garfield, who worked as a programmer on the Apollo project and later became a psychologist, described how people working at Grumman airspace at Long Island lit up after rerceiving Kennedy's statement about the moon. Even though they understood they lacked the knowledge needed to build any of the artifacts required for the moon mission, its was good for their moods (Garfield 1986).

Generative learning management, which is the name of the dual role leadership model I invented, is applicable to any branch, especially if they want to follow the marketsfluctuations. Hence, market-based generative learning ...

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