Abstract:

The financial sector is faced with fast moving and expansive changes in a dynamic environment and market. This situation is caused by current developments in the finance market, newly emerging competitors and less differentiation amongst existing banking services. However, banks are under high pressure to deal with this increasing and changing competition on the market. Taking a look into the future, banks need to tap new respectively further business areas and models, which don’t (only) focus on traditional and typical banking services any longer but go beyond. Ultimately, the individual’s continuous learning is an essential precondition for the organization’s learning and innovation capability.

In this regards, bank managers are key persons for providing and designing learning-oriented framework conditions for individual employees and team members at their workplace. Thus, they need to take up an extended leader role and understand themselves as personnel developer. Based on organizational learning theories and the connected field of knowledge management, this requires managers to act at four design levels, respectively, levels for organizational learning in order to contribute to the organization’s enhancement of the learning and innovation capability: At individual level, employees need be encouraged for learning through appropriate workplace infrastructures which allow self-organization. At team level, collaboration and team learning needs to be afforded. At organizational level, generation, usage, sharing knowledge and experiences needs to be ensured, this is connected to supportive cultures, structures and strategies. Finally, an openness to the environment is crucial for generating input “from outside” and developing ideas and, at best, knowledge in collaboration with external actors.

From an educational management perspective, we argue that an internal or external learning function can effectively support bank managers in this extended role. Therefore, we follow the research question "how can a learning function support bank managers in designing workplace framework conditions to enable continuous learning of bank employees and teams as a precondition for the bank’s organizational learning?”

Based on our theoretical framework we suggest a conceptual model for enhancing the ability for organizational learning and continuous innovation, which is based on four action areas: personnel development as executive management task, development work with individuals/teams, transformation of the organization, development of learning/innovation-oriented management systems. A case study-based investigation in bank organizations in Germany allowed verifying this model as well as further developing the action areas. The results identify highly relevant current and future starting points for the learning function to support managers with designing framework conditions for the employees' learning – this implies developing competencies for acting in an extended role. Hence, it becomes apparent that managers’ competencies are closely interlinked with and therefore can enhance the bank’s competencies for learning and development at organizational level. Consequently, we adapt the conceptual model with the interrelated competency development of managers and bank organization. Specifically, the four action areas exhibit core competencies for both in the sense of a competency model. Finally, this indicates a new role for the learning function.

Keywords:

Workplace framework conditions for learning, managers as personnel developers, organizational learning and devlopment, bank organizations.