Self-Guided Development: A proactive approach to employee development

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Labor and Human Resources

Grantor dc:publisher

The Ohio State University

Year dc:date

2013

Author dc:creator

• Dachner , Alison M.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Ellingson, Jill

• Management
• Employee development
• proactive behavior

Statement dc:rights

• unrestricted
• This thesis or dissertation is protected by copyright: all rights reserved. It may not be copied or redistributed beyond the terms of applicable copyright laws.

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1366142796

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:etd.ohiolink.edu:osu1366142796