Advancing Learning and Development in Motorola

Motorola is a US-based, world-leading electronics and telecommunications company. It has been considered as one of the top employee training companies in the world. From its inception, the company accorded the utmost importance to training rights within its sphere. The case under review describes how training and a strong learning ethic have become an integral part of Motorola’s culture (Gupta & Aparna, 2005). It details the numerous training and education initiatives undertaken by the company for its employees through Motorola University, and assesses how these initiatives have helped the company to advance the productivity of its workforce, quality of work, and overall performance. On the same note, the case also describes the e-learning initiatives developed and implemented by Motorola, as well as highlights the benefits of e-learning for training and development of employees (Gupta & Aparna, 2005). In accordance with Valamis Group (2019), organizational learning and development is the process by which enterprises improve over time by acquiring expertise and utilizing this expertise to create knowledge, and the created knowledge is then transferred within the company. Garvin (1993) conceptualized this from the angle of a learning organization, by referencing It was further suggested by Senge that in order to attain this end, the enterprise should adopt five component technologies: systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning (Garvin, 1993).

The company started training its employees way back in the 1920s, and the importance of training continued to grow. The initial stages of the company’s life, down to the early 1980s, saw the company looking for three essential qualities in employees when recruiting – communication and computational skills, basic problem solving, and willingness to accept work hours up to the time necessary for attaining quality output instead of regular clock hours (Gupta & Apama, 2005). In any case, the new training and development didn’t yield the desired results because while the management was learning new things, it was also unwilling to change from its old ways. To address this issue, the company introduced the Motorola Training and Education Centre (MTEC), established with the twin objectives of expanding the participative management process and helping improve the quality of products tenfold in the coming half-a-decade. However, this decreased the productive hours of the employees as they spent a lot of time away from their jobs for training programs (Gupta & Apama, 2005). They also discovered that people who attended the training, took the courses, went back to their jobs and reassumed their old attitudes (unwilling to change). To address this, the company introduced home-based training and it also failed as employees took the homework but never bothered to open it, as they didn’t consider the homework packages as a real training. After all these trials, the HR department came to the conclusion that occasional training programs and tie-ups with educational institutions and universities would always leave gaps in the training process (Gupta & Apama, 2005). Thus, the decision was reached for only a fully-fledged educational institution of its own, one that is capable of catering to the needs of training and developing the employees in the light of its global business strategy, and this resulted in the birth of the Motorola University in 1989, to serve this purpose.

In line with the above discussions, the key elements that affected the successful training and development of employees in Motorola are: unwillingness of the employees to change; lack of system thinking (the objectives of the top management were conflicting with the objectives of the lower management); and lack of incentives. On the first element, change is pivotal to training and development because employees with the best form of training will not develop by implementing the skills into their workplace without the commitment and dedication to change from their old working systems to the new ones they have been trained on (Senger, 1990; Nonaka, 1991). This is manifested in the fact that employees, after receiving the training, went back and continued with their old methods and attitudes. Brassey et al. (2019) stated that system thinking is one of the essential components of a successful learning and development strategy, and this was missing in Motorola because while the top management insisted on timely delivery, the lower management focused on delivering quality products, and this was conflicting. Finally, the issue of incentives is also missing, as employees need not only be encouraged to change, but also motivated to take steps towards changing (Roder, 2019). This was missing in Motorola. Instead, the company threatened their employees' job security by declaring that anybody unwilling to change or unable to meet a set target would be disengaged.

Theorizing organizational learning has been difficult due to the absence of practical guidance, and this has forced researchers to only match practical approaches with aspects of organizational learning theory (Basten et al., 2015; Dingsyr, 2005; Hoegl & Schulze, 2005; Wu et al., 2010). However, for the purpose of this review, the selected theories include single-and double-loop learning (Argyris & Schön, 1978), Garvin’s (1993) five building blocks, and organizational knowledge and creation theory (Nonaka, 1991). Single-loop learning is meant to change business processes without changing corporate values and culture, while double-loop looks at correcting organizational values and norms together with the business process (Lichtenstein, 2000; Lim & Chan, 2004; Pedler, 1995; Remedios & Boreham, 2004). At Motorola, the fact that employees are unwilling to change from their old methods is an indication that they have adopted single-loop learning. Organizational knowledge creation theory calls for a fusion of tacit and explicit knowledge through learning (Cheng et al., 2014; Loermans, 2002; Real et al., 2014). This is another issue in Motorola, where more explicit knowledge was developed (through educational training) and the employees were not given much room to develop tacit knowledge (through personal experience), which could be the reason for their lack of interest. The company also failed in implementing Garvin’s (1993) five building blocks: experimentation, systematic problem solving, learning from past experience, transferring knowledge, and learning from others, as most of these components were lacking in their learning and development strategies.

In line with the discussions above, Motorola can advance its learning and development programs in a number of ways. The first step is to adopt double-loop learning, ensuring changes in both the business process and corporate values and culture (Basten & Haamann, 2018). The implication is that the entire workforce will be forced to adopt the changes as their method (production process) will likely change with a change in culture. On the second note, a system thinking approach should be employed, ensuring that employees at all levels have similar goals (Basten & Haamann, 2018), and this will eliminate the conflict between top-level employees and lower-level employees. Finally, the company should integrate Garvin’s (1993) five building blocks as: experimenting with a few employees before pushing the entire workforce through a given training and development program; systematically solving their problems department by department instead of an all-out approach; basing present decisions on their past experience to avoid a repeat of negative outcomes; effectively transferring knowledge through the creation of the right room for tacit knowledge development and sharing; and learning from others (sharing ideas across departments, listening to the views of employees, and hiring outstanding professionals to head their learning and development strategies). Essentially, these measures will help the enterprise to advance its learning and development outcomes, truly becoming a learning organization (Oragui, 2020; Vinikas, 2021; CIPD, 2020; Liimatainen, 2020).

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