2008 PROCEEDINGS - Public Relations Society of America
2008 PROCEEDINGS - Public Relations Society of America
2008 PROCEEDINGS - Public Relations Society of America
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A Learning Organization: The <strong>Public</strong> <strong>Relations</strong> Classroom Away from Home<br />
Robert J. Petrausch<br />
Iona College<br />
rpetrausch@iona.edu<br />
A learning organization is one <strong>of</strong> that learns continuously and transforms itself. Learning<br />
takes place in individuals, teams, the classroom, and even communities with which the<br />
organization interacts. Pr<strong>of</strong>essors who teach public relations courses can turn classrooms away<br />
from home into a learning organization by building high-performance teams, encouraging<br />
collaboration and team learning, promoting inquiry and dialogue, and creating continuous<br />
learning opportunities. The linchpin <strong>of</strong> this approach can be found in helping students practice<br />
and implement action research, a process whereby students collect and analyze data together,<br />
reflect on problems in groups, and provide group-designed interventions as a way to solve public<br />
relations problems. Three action technologies can enhance action and learning in the classroom<br />
away from home: (1) action research, students use data to inform action; (2) In action refection<br />
learning, students learn how to learn from their experiences; (3) In action science, students<br />
examine their experiences to see patterns <strong>of</strong> learning or meta learning.<br />
Research Dimension for Learning Organization Team Performance<br />
A growing body <strong>of</strong> research links team success to bringing together people with<br />
complementary skills, talents, and a collective mind whereby individuals share expertise and<br />
knowledge. In a 1995 experiment, psychologists Diane Wei Liang, Richard Moreland, and Linda<br />
Argote demonstrated different ways that team members benefited from their collective<br />
knowledge when they learned together. This team <strong>of</strong> psychologists trained college students to<br />
assemble transistor radios alone and in groups <strong>of</strong> three. The results showed that members <strong>of</strong><br />
groups that had trained together remembered more details, built better quality radios, and<br />
exhibited greater trust in fellow members. By contrast, students in newly-formed groups were<br />
less likely to have the right mix <strong>of</strong> skills to complete tasks efficiently and knew less about each<br />
other’s strengths (Kozlowski & Ilgen, 2007, p. 58). Additional research done by organizational<br />
behavior expert Kyle Lewis <strong>of</strong> the McCombs School <strong>of</strong> Business at the University <strong>of</strong> Texas<br />
favors face-to-face activity in drawing on a team’s ability to access distributed knowledge. In<br />
groups that used phone or email exclusively, the skill did not emerge, according to Lewis’s<br />
research (Kozlowski & Ilgen, 2007, p. 59).<br />
Steven W.J. Kozlowski and Daniel R. Ilgen at Michigan State University noted in a<br />
Scientific <strong>America</strong>n Mind magazine article that when they reviewed the past 50 years <strong>of</strong> research<br />
literature on team factors that characterize best collaboration, the reality boiled down to “what<br />
team members feel, think, and do provide the strong predictors <strong>of</strong> team success” (p.56). The<br />
authors also suggest that these factors can be used to make teams work better, as well as spend<br />
more time providing students with exercises and knowledge about the team process itself.<br />
Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has spent more than 15 years<br />
studying group performance in jazz groups, theater ensembles, small businesses, and large<br />
corporations. He posits that improvisation can lead to group genius and organizations can<br />
successfully build improvisational teams. On the basis <strong>of</strong> his research, he identified seven<br />
characteristics <strong>of</strong> effective creative teams: (1) Innovation emerges over time. Team members<br />
who are working together can build a small chain <strong>of</strong> incremental ideas that lead to final<br />
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