Leading for learning : behavioral, educational, and methodological perspectives on multicultural team learning processes

This study starts from the notion that leadership is about mobilizing learning, and simultaneously pursues multifaceted purposes that benefit from each other: 1) to shed new light on learning behaviors of teams facing unfamiliarity, 2) develop one model of practical and effective leadership education, and 3) apply new technology to make methodological contributions to organizational studies, leadership education, and management practices. 1) The central research question is what behavioral factors affect team learning when the team faces both internal and external unfamiliarity - which stems from diversity and cultural barriers, and disruptive threats from the environment. The study examines 6 multicultural teams undergoing increasingly complex tasks, revealing the structures and processes with which they self-organized and temporal responses to the difficulties. 2) The experimental setting was a 10-days intensive leadership workshop with a distinct educational purpose to raise the participants' levels of contextual, reflective, and moral awareness, with the premise that exercising leadership involves mobilizing learning to adapt to unfamiliarity. The study attempts to assess the effectiveness of the workshop, while examining the effects of exercise of leadership on the teams' learning processes. 3) The study also applies wearable sensors that capture nonlinguistic social signals and visualize group interaction patterns, for 3 intended applications as (a) research tool for social network analysis to supplement ethnography, (b) learning tool to stimulate reflection and dialogue, and (c) intervention tool to alter the flows of information.

Department dc:contributor.department

Sloan School of Management.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2008

Author dc:creator

• Kanehira, Naoto, S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Deborah Ancona.

• Sloan School of Management.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/44432

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/44432