Gen Inertia: How to Overcome it?

Abstract

Information is vital for organizations to maintain competitive advantage in complex, challenging environments. Information (or Gen) is generated from many aspects of learning, project work, data analysis, new assignments, or, from research and development work that adds to the already existing organizational knowledge bank. From Francis Bacon to Hayek, most scholars and philosophers have acknowledged the power and utility of knowledge. Knowledge is essential for workforces to adapt to new, challenging work environments. There is a substantial amount of literature devoted primarily to managerial learning at workplace, and in organizations. However, research devoted to the obstacles of employee (workforce) learning and education at workplace is still lagging behind the literature on managerial learning. This paper concentrates on idiosyncratic features of workforce learning, and introduces the concept of “gen inertia” - an aspect of knowledge inertia - which acts as a binding constraint to effective learning in organizations. The concept of knowledge inertia (KI) is not new, and this work builds upon the previous work done by Shu-hsien Liao (2002), to derive a new concept of Gen Inertia (GI). Workforces bring in new knowledge, as well as they generate new information which they apply in their daily job routines. They also gain knowledge from learning-by-doing that contributes to their evolving skillsets. However, it has been observed that employees often use stale, outdated, stagnant knowledge (which is the old knowledge that they already have), to deal with new emerging problems. The reasons seems to be manifold: e.g., lack of proper means of support for employees to continue learning, lack of educational infrastructures, resources and manpower, or deficiency of motivating factors which fails to stimulate learning under organizational (business) environment. While employees fall behind in their learning curve, their attempt to apply whatever existing knowledge they already have to deal with new emergent problems, takes a toll on their overall performance, efficiency, and creativity. Besides, there are numerous auxiliary factors which hinders workforce learning that prevents them from absorbing new, current information. All these factors contribute to the concept of “Gen inertia” - or, inertia of learning (IoL) (an aspect of knowledge inertia) in organizations. The goal of this paper is to underscore this emerging problem and advocate effective solutions to deal with the problem of gen inertia in learning organizations.