When the student is ready, the teacher will appear: The impact of change on readiness to learn
Abstract
As individuals go through life and experience the workplace they encounter changes, new and novel situations, planned and unplanned. Each of those encounters is an opportunity for an individual to appraise their readiness to deal with that situation. Organizational change literature predominantly focuses on individual negative appraisals of change, but individuals at work often experience many unplanned changes at the same time. This study first examines whether change can act as a primer that readies someone to learn, then examines whether the individual differences of dispositional trust or self-negative feedback seeking moderate the effect of change on learning readiness. I review overall change, and then I differentiate between positive change and negative change. This study's findings support the hypothesis that an individual experiencing change has a direct effect on their readiness to learn. Further, it shows that some minimum amount of change is necessary to prime that readiness, but too much change can suppress it. Individual enrollment in learning opportunities supported this conclusion for both positive and negative change. This research extends the classic theory of stress response, using appraisal theory to make application for individual learning. Self-report data on readiness to learn during negative change revealed a relationship between negative attitudes and positive actual enrollment, supporting theory that coping can drive readiness to learn. Results of the study did not support the idea that the individual differences of self-negative feedback seeking or dispositional trust would moderate the change to learning readiness relationship. Some relationships in the data suggest these individual differences may act on individual learning through a different mechanism than learning readiness.
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- OSU Dissertations [11222]