Abstract

Approaches to sustainable learning cultures are a focal point of the current scientific debate within the competence development research. Within this discussion, self organization gains a key role in the configuration of competence development. However, the author is of the opinion, that the interaction of self- and external organization and the role allocation of competence development’s participants accordingly should be focused. It is postulated that, since the coordination between self-organization and external organization is deficient, competence development activities often do not lead to the desired outcomes. Against this background, different forms of self- and external organization as well as different combinations of self an external organization were analyzed. An empirical study was undertaken in which a total of 109 companies were involved. The study investigated various expectations surrounding self-organization and external organization in large companies as opposed to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME), together with the conditions under which self-organization and external organization occur in these companies. The empirical study comes to the conclusion that large enterprises emphasize the central role of human resources development (HRD) for the innovation capacity of an organization more than SME. There are also different ways of combining self- and external organization of competence development depending on the enterprise size. In contrast to the given assumption, it could not be identified that managers as human resources (HR) developer can improve the success of competence development.