Learning in Humans versus Hierarchies

Abstract

Organizations worldwide as well as scholars in business, psychology, medicine, and the social sciences are racing to identify the rules that drive organizational innovation vs status quo, the rules that drive employee engagement vs oppression, and the rules that drive effective leadership vs micromanagement. This phenomenon is burgeoning because relying on instinctive leadership alone leaves organizations susceptible to the possibility of ineffectual leadership in their hierarchies. To identify these rules, we first need to connect the patterns of how humans learn and solve problems and the patterns of leadership in hierarchies to find the pathways that drive organizational learning vs conformity. Only then can we identify the rules for those pathways, describing how and why learning and growth occurs in any organization or hierarchy. With this operationalized framework, we can now teach supervisors how to recognize the clues and evidence that result from our belief-behavior systems to subsequently convert conformity processes into learning processes, generating organizational innovation and growth as well as employee engagement, loyalty, and trust.