Can managers accept that employees train in e-learning ?

Abstract

Document de travail LESTE-learning was initially considered as the “silver bullet” of training. This new education pattern would allow to go beyond the limits of more classical "classroom-based" training sessions. However, it seems to us that one characteristic has not been considered well enough. Employees in e-learning train in the workplace, often on their own computer. Such a situation generates a role ambiguity: is the employee training or working? This is delicate for managers to handle, since in the first case, they exercise no direct hierarchical authority, whereas in the second case, they must. First we have reviewed the literature to analyse the complex relation between e-learning and hierarchical responsibility. It shows that the question of socialisation has clearly been identified as being a major obstacle to the development of e-learning. Most authors thus plead in favour of a change from e-learning to blended learning, which means developing training processes that combine e-learning sessions with more classical “classroom-based” sessions allowing trainees to exchange ideas and help one another. However, the literature does not mention the question of the relation existing between trainees and their own manager. We have then analysed the literature on organisational socialisation to try and find an answer to this question. Though this notion is rapidly developing nowadays, we noticed that it had not yet considered this theme. Thus we end this article by offering a specific conceptual framework allowing to analyse it and do a first test from data collected in four major French banks. This exploratory work therefore leads to the idea that managers' positioning towards e-learning is a question that is to be taken into account if we really wish to develop e-learning in organisations