Responding to New Roles

Abstract

Organizations that aspire to become learning organizations must encourage managers to adopt new roles as coaches, trainers and educators if learning is to become distributed and continuous at multiple levels within the organization. This article presents the findings of a large scale educational change initiative in a Fortune 10 company in which managers adopted instructional roles in a cascaded delivery approach. Captured in this data are the perceptions of managers about serving as instructors and the resulting role fit tension between managers who do not perceive providing instruction as a managerial role, and those managers who clearly consider instructional activities to be an integral part of their jobs. The issues that these managers confront in assuming instructional roles are discussed as they implement this cascaded delivery process. Implications for future practice and areas for further research are provided.