Managing Intangibles
A Company That Learns Together: Incorporating Continuing Education and Professional Development into the Organizational Design
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Patrick Hill
The purpose of this paper is to address the need for a progressive training program in organizations to provide employees with position-appropriate technical and ethical training that will increase innovation and loyalty. This conceptual paper examines technical and ethical training models for organizations; the organizational design approach for a progressive training program; and the need for communications and change management for its implementation. Organizations that invest in their employees’ professional development have higher degrees of success, longevity, and innovation. Implementing training into the organizational design creates efficiency and grows internal leaders who have both the technical expertise and moral character needed to lead at higher levels. By placing the responsibility of ongoing training on the Human Resources department, the individual managers and supervisors are free to focus on the primary operations of their departments. Free and open two-way communication with regards to changing the culture and practices creates a culture where all employees are valued for their beliefs, experience, and contributions. Recommend further studies on organizations that struggle with high turnover and employee dissatisfaction and see if poor training or lack of training is a factor. Organizations that do not currently have an ongoing and progressive training program can use the research, tools, and proposed structure of this paper to implement a program to increase the innovation and longevity of the organization and the loyalty and professional development of their employees.
Elimination of Creative Employee’s Knowledge Depreciation
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lina Girdauskiene
Successful economic development and the competitiveness of the world nations mostly depend on capability of the manpower. Therefore organizations should be interested in improving the present human resources by constant knowledge and skills renewal. Despite of growing interest of scientist in creative employee and knowledge depreciation, the problem of creative employee’s knowledge depreciation is still being studied in a broad sense while lacking concentration in specific the issues of elimination of the depreciation. Thus the individual employee differences of various sectors would be recognized and the most suitable ways of elimination of creative employee’s knowledge depreciation would be found. Scientific problem is formulated as a question what ways of knowledge depreciation should be applied to various creative employees according to their type of learning and the stage of their career life cycle? Quantitative methodology was applied and findings show that knowledge depreciation is a dynamic process with various causes what are mutual for all creative employees without the differentiation by their style of learning. To eliminate knowledge depreciation while using various learning styles the most acceptable ways of each style must be applied. The ways of elimination of knowledge depreciation cannot be reasonably used by career life cycle in spite of some distinct connections with it. Based on the carried out research it can be stated that the ways of elimination differ depending on the learning style however some of the ways are universal for several learning types.
Leveraging Transactional and Relational Response Differences with Demographic and Psychographic Segmentation
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Manfred F. Maute
General/observable approaches to market segmentation are commonplace when more is known about the age, income and social class of customers than the motivations and needs that reside behind their purchasing behavior. Although less accessible, product-specific/unobservable approaches to segmentation based on values, attitudes and life styles are useful or segmenting customers distinguished more so by how they feel about and respond to particular brands/vendors than their demographic characteristics. Using data from a nationally representative consumer panel, demographic and psychographic segmentations of credit card customers are developed with agglomerative and k-means clustering and the effects of segmentation on transactional and relational response differences are examined with multivariate analysis of covariance. Novice customers segmented on household size, age of household head, income and consumer debt differed systematically in terms of overall and co-branded credit card purchases. Segmenting long-tenured customers on product-specific risk, money savviness, debt and deal-proneness values had a significant, but somewhat less powerful effect on relationship satisfaction and cross-buying. However, when household size and income were accounted for in the psychographic segmentation, the effect on relational response differences was magnified threefold. Implications for segmentation theory and practice are considered.
Organizational Designing: Organizing as a Human-centered Design Practice
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jan Auernhammer
Organizational routines are both the micro foundation of Dynamic Capabilities as well as a mechanism of organizational evolution. Such routines are embedded in situational and organizational context. When not consciously and active organized these routines will operate on the default patterns of activities, the shared accepted way of working. Enabling routines towards innovation and organizational renewal requires consciously and actively designing and organizing both context and activities. Designing these situation and experiences have been practiced in human-centered design. This research developed and evaluated in two large companies in Germany and Japan a novel approach of organizing through human-centered design practices to enable agile and innovation within organizations towards organizational renewal. This paper presents both the approach and learnings from case research.
