This paper revealed how the top managers learned cognitively from the events experienced through the career system of their company and the difference of the learning methods between top managers and the employees who were not ones though they had once been nominated as the candidates. In addition, it identified that top managers utilized the different ways of cognitive learning methods according to the traits of the carrier experiences regarding personnel transfer whether characteristics of new jobs had strong interdependency with previous ones or not.
The past research have approached this theme with the two different ways; one adopted the event-lesson framework and the other employed the economic analysis based on the cost-benefit comparison for personnel transfers within a firm. This article pointed out the problems of the two approaches, and, it, therefore, investigated the relationship between the career experiences and the lessons from them with the “event-cognitive learning-lesson” framework.
The interview research was conducted in 2006 to the 20 employees who were candidates of the top management members of the large and listed Japanese company at that time. And 8 years later, 11 of them became the directors of the holding company or its two main business companies.
The following discussion indicates that these findings imply these three things. First, ther is the need of introducing “event-cognitive learning-lesson” framework to future researches. The framework will give the more precise explanation the way employees learn from their career events proactively. Second, the tendency of cognitive learning employees conduct may be one of the important determinants for mastering the requisite knowledge and abilities for top managers. Finally, there is necessity of the modification of the economic theory on the rational width of personnel transfer and its function for the development of top managers.
The limitation of this research and the further direction of research were also indicated.
