Frank,
The two research questions you mention in your posting are:
1.) What is the role of senior managers in the organization's
transformational process? (Does an empirical method exist to measure this
role?)
>
2.) What influence do senior managers have on the learning process and
learning success of their organization in general?
It seems that your approach is to focus on the role of the senior managers
as individuals. I would like to contribute an alternative approach which
would focus on the role of the management team in each of these
processes. The advantage of this approach is that your conclusions may
lead to answers from a system's perspective whereas the understanding of
the role of individual managers would yield data at the individual level
of analysis.
My experience has been that often individual managers may be advocates of
learning and/or transformation processes, yet because they are part of
disfunctional management teams, their influence is limited.
Assuming that the management team supports the learning process, the basic
assumption is that, the success of that process will be heavily influenced
by the level of maturity and effectiveness of the team.
There are several team assessment instruments in the market, some of them
have been scientifically validated, providing therefore precise data on
which you can base your conclusions. I do not know if any of these
instruments have been translated into German.
Hope this was helpful.
-- Georges Buzaglo, Ph.D. Georges@usa.pipeline.com