Responding to new roles - A qualitative study of managers as instructors

Organizations that aspire to become learning organisations must encourage m anagers to adopt new roles as coaches, trainers and educators if learning i s to become distributed and continuous at multiple levels within the organi zation. This article presents the findings of a large scale educational cha nge initiative in a Fortune 10 company in which managers adopted instructio nal roles in a cascaded delivery approach. Captured in this data are the pe rceptions of managers about serving as instructors and the resulting role f it tension between managers who do not perceive providing instruction as a managerial role, and those managers who clearly consider instructional acti vities to be an integral part of their jobs. The issues that these managers confront in assuming instructional roles are discussed as they implement t his cascaded delivery process. Implications for future practice and areas f or further research are provided.