2008 PROCEEDINGS - Public Relations Society of America

A Learning Organization: The Public Relations Classroom Away from Home
Robert J. Petrausch
Iona College
rpetrausch@iona.edu
A learning organization is one of that learns continuously and transforms itself. Learning
takes place in individuals, teams, the classroom, and even communities with which the
organization interacts. Professors who teach public relations courses can turn classrooms away
from home into a learning organization by building high-performance teams, encouraging
collaboration and team learning, promoting inquiry and dialogue, and creating continuous
learning opportunities. The linchpin of this approach can be found in helping students practice
and implement action research, a process whereby students collect and analyze data together,
reflect on problems in groups, and provide group-designed interventions as a way to solve public
relations problems. Three action technologies can enhance action and learning in the classroom
away from home: (1) action research, students use data to inform action; (2) In action refection
learning, students learn how to learn from their experiences; (3) In action science, students
examine their experiences to see patterns of learning or meta learning.
Research Dimension for Learning Organization Team Performance
A growing body of research links team success to bringing together people with
complementary skills, talents, and a collective mind whereby individuals share expertise and
knowledge. In a 1995 experiment, psychologists Diane Wei Liang, Richard Moreland, and Linda
Argote demonstrated different ways that team members benefited from their collective
knowledge when they learned together. This team of psychologists trained college students to
assemble transistor radios alone and in groups of three. The results showed that members of
groups that had trained together remembered more details, built better quality radios, and
exhibited greater trust in fellow members. By contrast, students in newly-formed groups were
less likely to have the right mix of skills to complete tasks efficiently and knew less about each
other’s strengths (Kozlowski & Ilgen, 2007, p. 58). Additional research done by organizational
behavior expert Kyle Lewis of the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas
favors face-to-face activity in drawing on a team’s ability to access distributed knowledge. In
groups that used phone or email exclusively, the skill did not emerge, according to Lewis’s
research (Kozlowski & Ilgen, 2007, p. 59).
Steven W.J. Kozlowski and Daniel R. Ilgen at Michigan State University noted in a
Scientific American Mind magazine article that when they reviewed the past 50 years of research
literature on team factors that characterize best collaboration, the reality boiled down to “what
team members feel, think, and do provide the strong predictors of team success” (p.56). The
authors also suggest that these factors can be used to make teams work better, as well as spend
more time providing students with exercises and knowledge about the team process itself.
Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has spent more than 15 years
studying group performance in jazz groups, theater ensembles, small businesses, and large
corporations. He posits that improvisation can lead to group genius and organizations can
successfully build improvisational teams. On the basis of his research, he identified seven
characteristics of effective creative teams: (1) Innovation emerges over time. Team members
who are working together can build a small chain of incremental ideas that lead to final
172