Continuing to learn key to job performance, June 9, 2006,
7D.
One of
the most important aspects of a manager’s job is to ensure
that workers learn and confidently perform their jobs.
Whether the workers learn through direct on-the-job
experience or learn from sources outside of their
organizations, learning job specific skills and competencies
is critical for organizational effectiveness.
Learning
refers to a relatively permanent change in understanding
about certain things, concepts, and relationships. Learning
occurs as a result of experience and influences the ways
that individuals think, feel, and behave. The expression
“learning curve” refers to the time and effort required to
master a newly learned skill or concept. At first, new
methods, skills, and previously unconfronted challenges
require additional concentration, time to figure out new
methods and procedures, and, when performing physical tasks,
time to develop “muscle memory”—where the body performs the
task almost automatically, with little mental thought or
concentration.
Knowledge is related to learning—it is the stuff that you
know. You only know things about which you have been
exposed, paid attention, processed in your mind, and stored
away in your brain for future retrieval. People only know
what they have been exposed to and filed away in a
relatively permanent manner for future use—that is, learned.
Learning
can occur as a result of direct experience or vicariously
through the experiences of others. When a parent cautions a
child about the dangers of undertaking a potentially harmful
action, the parent is trying to teach the child about
actions and consequences without the child having to
experience the consequence first hand. From an
organizational perspective, vicarious learning can occur by
observing others perform or by reading accounts of others’
performances. By observing and analyzing someone “model”
appropriate and inappropriate actions and behaviors, workers
can develop new skills and competencies. Watching others
perform before actually performing oneself, allows new
learners to develop confidence in themselves to perform the
task, before ever having to perform the task directly by
themselves.
Self-Efficacy refers to the confidence that a person has in
his or her ability to perform a task. High self-efficacy
refers to high confidence and low self-efficacy refers to
low confidence. Self-efficacy comes from direct past
experiences performing the task and vicariously by watching
others perform the task. Self-efficacy about a new task can
be strengthened when one learns that the new task is similar
to another task in which he or she is already confident. A
seasoned tennis player, for example, would feel fairly
confident beginning the game of racquetball. Both games
require similar skills and abilities and they share many of
the same principles and strategies for success. However,
the similar natures of the two games might cause those with
poor experiences playing tennis in the past to feel less
confident about their chances of success playing
racquetball.
To bring
out the best from workers, managers should make sure that
followers understand and have opportunities to successfully
develop new skills and competencies. The concepts of
learning, vicarious learning, and self-efficacy help give
insight on ways that people learn and succeed in new jobs
and tasks.
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