The Trickle-Down Effects of Inclusive Leadership on Employees’ Innovative Behavior: The Joint Moderating Effects of Vicarious Learning and Organizational Inclusion Climate

The supervisor-subordinate dyad has been well articulated in the framework of inclusive leadership and employee outcomes. Applying a multisource dataset from China, the present study develops a trickle-down model of inclusive leadership across three hierarchical levels (i.e., top managers, supervisors, and employees). Building on social learning theory and social exchange theory, the study found empirical support for the assumptions that both top management and supervisory inclusive leadership have a positive effect on employees’ innovative behavior. In addition, the findings support the proposition that supervisor's inclusive leadership mediates the effects of top manager's inclusive leadership on employees’ innovative behavior. The study also verified that vicarious learning and organizational inclusion climate jointly moderate the relationship between the top manager's inclusive leadership and the supervisor's inclusive leadership. The contribution, limitations, and future directions are also discussed.

Storytelling as a Tool for Vicarious Learning among Air Medical Transport Crews

Learning vicariously from the experiences of others at work, such as those working on different teams or projects, has long been recognized as a driver of collective performance in organizations. Yet as work becomes more ambiguous and less observable in knowledge-intensive organizations, previously identified vicarious learning strategies, including direct observation and formal knowledge transfer, become less feasible. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with flight nurse crews in an air medical transport program, I inductively build a model of how storytelling can serve as a valuable tool for vicarious learning. I explore a multistage process of triggering, telling, and transforming stories as a means by which flight nurses convert the raw experience of other crews’ patient transports into prospective knowledge and expanded repertoires of responses for potential future challenges. Further, I highlight how this storytelling process is situated within the transport program’s broader structures and practices, which serve to enable flight nurses’ storytelling and to scale the lessons of their stories throughout the entire program. I discuss the implications of these insights for the study of storytelling as a learning tool in organizations, as well as for revamping the field’s understanding of vicarious learning in knowledge-intensive work settings.

Improving high lean team performance through aligned behaviour-value patterns and coactive vicarious learning-by-doing

PurposeWhy are some lean workfloor teams able to improve their already high performance, over time, and others not? By studying teams' and leaders' behaviour-value patterns, this abductive field study uncovers a dynamic capability at the team level.Design/methodology/approachVarious methods were employed over three consecutive years to thoroughly examine five initially high-performing lean workfloor teams, including their leaders. These methods encompassed micro-behavioural coding of 59 h of film footage, surveys, individual and group interviews, participant observation and archival data, involving objective and perceptual team-performance indicators. Two of the five teams continued to improve and perform highly.FindingsContinuously improving high lean team performance is found to be associated with (1) team behaviours such as frequent performance monitoring, information sharing, peer support and process improvement; (2) team leaders who balance, over time, task- and relations-oriented behaviours; (3) higher-level leaders who keep offering the team face-to-face support, strategic clarity and tangible resources; (4) these three actors' endorsement of self-transcendence and openness-to-change work values and alignment, over time, with their behaviours; and (5) coactive vicarious learning-by-doing as a “stable collective activity pattern” among team, team leader, and higher-level leadership.Originality/valueSince lean has been undertheorised, the authors invoked insights from organisational behaviour and management theories, in combination with various fine- and coarse-grained data, over time. The authors uncovered actors' behaviour-value patterns and a collective learning-by-doing pattern that may explain continuous lean team performance improvement. Four theory-enriching propositions were developed and visualised in a refined model which may already benefit lean practitioners.

Entrepreneurial learning in online communities

New digital technologies possess the potential to transform entrepreneurial processes, such as how entrepreneurs pursue opportunities and access funding and how they learn. How entrepreneurs learn may be transformed as digital technologies provide new spaces for learning, such as online communities. Online communities can gather thousands of participants and provide entrepreneurs with new opportunities for learning that are not limited by time, space, or social class. Yet, we know little about how entrepreneurs take advantage of the new digital opportunities of learning. To remedy this, we studied a large online community of entrepreneurs on Reddit (r/startups), where we qualitatively analyzed the top-voted 100 threads from 2018 to 2019 (10,277 comments in total). By drawing on coactive vicarious learning, a theory that describes how learning is socially constructed through discursive interactions, we outline how entrepreneurial learning is socially constructed through conversations, which are taking place in different micro-learning contexts. Through identifying distinct entrepreneurial learning conversations, we build new theory on entrepreneurial learning in online communities. Our theorizing contributes to (1) the growing research on how entrepreneurial learning is socially constructed in communities, (2) the current debate on knowledge creation in online communities, and (3) the knowledge on how coactive vicarious learning unfolds in communities. Plain English Summary When entrepreneurs go online to learn, new research shows how online communities provide entrepreneurs with diverse learning spaces for developing ideas, learning new skills, and coping with the uncertainties of being an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs increasingly use social media for doing business, but can they also use it to learn about doing business? In this article, we investigate this question by studying an online community of entrepreneurs on Reddit called r/startups, in which entrepreneurs exchange experiences and help each other with questions and issues. We show that entrepreneurial learning is taking place in five forms of learning conversations, which are situated in four learning contexts that differ from each other, from a classroom with a student–teacher dynamic, a collab space where entrepreneurs collect ideas and develop new skills and knowledge, a club context in which they challenge each other, and a care context in which they can bring their fears and uncertainties. Our findings show how entrepreneurship practitioners can make use of online communities, encouraging teaching and policy to pay more attention to how entrepreneurs work digitally.