Aprendizagem individual e coletiva em organizações de pequeno porte: um estudo em duas lojas de acessórios femininos

• Autor(a) principal: Hirota, Elza
• Data de Publicação: 2011
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações do Mackenzie
• Texto Completo: http://dspace.mackenzie.br/handle/10899/23348
• topic: aprendizagem formal; aprendizagem informal; aprendizagem individual; aprendizagem coletiva; aprendizagem em equipes de vendas; aprendizagem experiencial; teoria da aprendizagem social; formal learning; informal learning; individual learning; collective learning; sales team learning; experiential learning; theory of social learning; CNPQ::CIENCIAS SOCIAIS APLICADAS::ADMINISTRACAO

This research paper investigates organizational learning, from the following perspective: how do the individual and collective learning processes function in a small organization? The overall objective is to understand the learning process in small organizations on the individual and collective levels and the formal and informal mechanisms involved. To attain this overall objective, two specific objectives were defined. The first specific objective is to identify and describe how the owners and employees of two stores in a woman s apparel retail chain learned to work in this area, looking at both their formal and informal learning processes. The second specific objective is to analyze and compare the formal and informal learning processes of the owners, the managers and the employees at these stores and to evaluate if there is a difference in the pattern of learning due to a difference in the locations of the stores (one being located on the street and one being located in a shopping center). The theories and concepts which form the foundation of this research are: experiential learning, the theory of social learning as well as formal and informal learning. This paper, which is of an exploratory nature, has adopted a qualitative perspective and has been developed based on the premises of a basic or generic qualitative study . This choice is justified based on the emphasis placed on discovering and interpreting the lessons learned by the participants themselves in terms of their lives and their experiences. The main strategy for data collection was the conduction of interviews at the workplace. An analysis of these interviews led to the creation of hierarchically organized analytic codes to facilitate the interpretation and extraction of significant data. One of the main results of this research is that the interviewees learned through different forms of informal learning: exchanging experiences, self-taught learning, and external interactions in the workplace. We also can affirm that learning occurs much more on the individual level than at the collective level, a fact which is related to the characteristics of the organizational environments investigated,which place management in the central role. The managers are those who command, train and follow the day to day work of the employees, and they serve as models to be emulated and are responsible for the store s earnings. No significant differences were observed in the forms of learning used by the owners, the managers and the employees. As far as the location of the stores is concerned, there was a general consensus that there is no difference between the forms of learning utilized in a store located on the street as opposed to one located within a shopping center, and that the learning process is essentially the same for any type of retail sales organization, differing only in terms of the product that is being sold.