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Self-Guided Development: A proactive approach to employee development

Dachner , Alison M.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1366142796

Abstract Details

2013, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Labor and Human Resources.
The effectiveness of formal training and development initiatives are becoming more difficult to realize in response to more dynamic and decentralized work environments. Organizations are increasingly relying on employee initiatives to react to rapid changes at work. The current prevalence of informal learning and development in practice emphasizes the need to further explore this phenomenon. To that effect, this dissertation defines self-guided development as a set of knowledge, skill or relationship building learning activities that generate human capital, but are unstructured, voluntary and not administratively or operationally provided by the organization. Self-guided development offers a flexible and efficient method for building human capital in today's work environment. This dissertation has two objectives. First, to embed self-guided development within the development literature as in important type of proactive behavior. Second, to define self-guided development and begin to establish its nomological network. Self-guided development should be influenced by both individual differences (e.g., proactive personality) and contextual variables (e.g., autonomy and training climate). In addition, these individual differences and contextual variables should interact such that employee's who possess traits that are likely to result in self-guided development are most likely to actually engage in self-guided development if the work environment and job support expression of those traits. Self-guided development should lead to valuable firm outcomes such as higher performance and knowledge sharing. This effect should be enhanced if employees experience positive exchange relationships at work with their organization, supervisor and coworkers. Field data was collected by surveying 103 employees at two times to examine the nature of self-guided development and test the hypotheses in this dissertation. Sixty-nine employees had data for both surveys that could be matched. Self-guided development was measured using 32 behaviors that met the criteria for being considered self-guided development. Content adequacy results supported the use of the 32 items. Results show that self-guided development was prevalent among employees. In fact, of the 32 self-guided development behaviors identified for this research, every single one was used to some extent by employees. Simple and hierarchical regression was used to test the hypothesized relationships. Both individual differences and contextual variables were found to influence engagement in self-guided development. Proactive personality and training climate each had a positive, significant relationship with self-guided development. However, there was not enough power to detect significant results for most of the other hypothesized relationships.
Jill Ellingson (Advisor)
Raymond Noe (Committee Member)
Howard Klein (Committee Member)
132 p.
Management
Employee development; proactive behavior

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Dachner , A. M. (2013). Self-Guided Development: A proactive approach to employee development [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1366142796

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Dachner , Alison. Self-Guided Development: A proactive approach to employee development. 2013. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1366142796.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Dachner , Alison. "Self-Guided Development: A proactive approach to employee development." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1366142796

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1366142796
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.