Reynolds, McCauley, Tsacoumis, and the Jeanneret Symposium Participants (Reference Reynolds, McCauley and Tsacoumis2018) present outcomes of the 2-day Jeanneret Symposium describing the state of the science and practice related to the assessment and development of senior leaders. They call for cross-disciplinary and/or organization-level research that examines “how organizations mature their assessment and development practices toward an integrated system embedded in a development culture” (p. 646). The purpose of this commentary is to answer this call and add to their work by proposing a systems thinking framework of organizational development where a corporate university plays a pivotal role.
Systems thinking refers to a way of understanding organizational activities where every part and every move of an organization are embedded within its internal and external environments. This draws directly from Senge's (Reference Senge1990) learning organization theory and, more generally, from systems theories in other fields such as biology, ecology, engineering, and psychology. In this framework, we situate leader assessment and development in a larger organizational context in which the HR architecture fits business strategies and operating environments in order to achieve sustainable competitive advantage and viability. Specifically, we grant a corporate university a role as an organic mechanism that enables an organization and its partners to learn, to act, and to transform in order to survive and prosper under dynamic environments. Thus, this framework goes beyond the scope of senior leader assessment and development, as it describes a full organic system where an organization is in constant interaction with its external environment, business partners, internal systems, and workforce. We believe that this framework will help to implement many concepts and suggestions made by Reynolds et al. (Reference Reynolds, McCauley and Tsacoumis2018), who emphasize the importance of multilevel, contextualized, and dynamic views of leader assessment and development. Moreover, we argue that this systems thinking may be the best way to cultivate an organization's leadership bench strength for long-term organizational development and viability.
Our logic is as follows. First, senior leader assessment and development aim to achieve business results and long-term organizational viability, but these objectives cannot be realized fully unless they are seamlessly embedded into the whole HR architecture and business ecosystems. Second, traditional thinking and the practice of employee development tend to follow time-consuming processes of identifying needs, designing or selecting interventions, implementing interventions, evaluating effects, and revising activities. This approach becomes problematic in a world of fast change and ambiguity. Third, our systems thinking emphasizes learning by doing through stretch assignments and close collaboration with all business partners, in which leaders learn key competencies specifically relevant to their unique context. This allows the organization's leadership bench strength to grow naturally from the inception. Learning and doing should not and cannot be separated in a dynamic environment. Fourth, our systems thinking aims at creating a sustainable development culture and ecosystem that embrace uncertainty, ambiguity and constant transformation. This provides an organization with a concrete infrastructure for effective leader assessment and development.
This commentary consists of two parts. In the first part, we define corporate university. In the second part, we introduce propositions about a corporate university's role in order to create a complete system for an organization that integrates its business strategy and HR architecture.
Defining a Corporate University's Role for Sustainable Organizational Competitive Advantage
Most current definitions of corporate university see it as a means to coordinate learning and development (L&D) activities in order to achieve organizational goals. Plompen (Reference Plompen2005) describes a corporate university as “the overall organizational umbrella for aligning and coordinating all learning for employees in order to achieve the organization's goals” (p. 83). Practices in corporate universities evolve over time; they have seen major shifts, from physical training centers to virtualized entity and from an emphasis on L&D to the alignment of L&D with strategic objectives. Some researchers claim that in an increasingly global and unpredictable age, the corporate university must progress from being a primarily social and knowledge transfer mechanism to facilitating organizational renewal and transformation—in effect, becoming the organization's learning laboratory (Ryan, Prince, & Turner, Reference Ryan, Prince and Turner2015). In this commentary, we define corporate university as an organic mechanism that enables an organization and its partners to learn, to act, and to transform in order to survive and prosper under dynamic environments.
Though the corporate university will take different forms and roles in different companies such as GE, Apple, Deloitte and many others, there is a growing emphasis on its role as a driver of business results. According to Fred Harburg, former chief learning officer (CLO) of Motorola University, an ideal corporate university should be able to understand the business, the customers and the competencies required so as to provide better products or services and to have a more engaged workforce. AT&T Senior Vice President and CLO John Palmer reports that they have used corporate university to facilitate postmerger integration and business transformation (Rio, Reference Rio2018).
We provide an illustrative example to further expand this concept. One company, for example, may regularly host forums or workshops and invite business partners (suppliers, customers, investors and employees) there to discuss topics of common concern, such as macro policies, industry and market trends, technology advancement, and any other issues that may have an impact on their business operation. In this way, the company can ensure that it is always at the forefront of the market, gain insights into market trends, and adjust its goals and strategies accordingly, in a timely manner. This advantage may help boost the company's reputation and provide it with a beneficial position in strategic networks. This, in turn, may help attract talented people within an informal network so that its HR professionals can recruit at an appropriate time. Similar dialogues within a company will provide information and insights into how one strategy works with current market conditions and how it should be revised. A company can also conduct experimental business activities through its corporate university to test new products or new markets and provide opportunities for people who have potential but who are not yet in formal leadership positions to manage projects. These habitual entrepreneurial trials together with its proximity to market allow a company to remain flexible and adaptive over time. These experiments take place at the corporate level and therefore should not affect business units’ financial performance. This is an institutional arrangement to ensure that experiments and innovations can be implemented. Other policies such as performance appraisal and compensation/reward systems need to be aligned with the practices. As shown in this illustrative example, all these activities can be coordinated by a corporate university, but the physical presence of a corporate university itself is not necessarily a systems thinking. Indeed, what really matters is a mechanism that organically integrates all these activities, which can be bestowed upon a corporate university.
We argue that a corporate university has great potential to drive an organization's sustainable competitive advantage if its role is organically extended. This role transformation is required by the dynamic business environments where an organization's competition boundary is blurring, and its opponents are sometimes unpredictable. In this situation, competition and collaboration are equally important between a firm and its partners including suppliers, customers, employees, and investors. The HR architecture therefore needs to fit vertically with business strategies and trends, and to align horizontally with various HR systems in order to achieve competitive advantage. Senior leaders play a critical role in this fit because they are the primary force to drive organizational change and evolution. Senior leader assessment and development serve, and depend on, the HR architecture and organizational viability, and a redefined corporate university helps this connection to happen. In the next part, we introduce four propositions that outline a corporate university's role. These proposed roles complement Reynolds et al.’s discussion on senior leader assessment and development.
Proposition 1: A corporate university that functions as a forum for collaboration among all business partners will strengthen its organization's sustainable competitive advantage
Our systems thinking of corporate university provides one answer to the critical question asked by Reynolds et al. (Reference Reynolds, McCauley and Tsacoumis2018), “How to address questions of readiness for specific future roles within the context that will exist for the role and acknowledge that context is constantly shifting?” (p. 638). Constantly shifting contexts, internal or external, require an organization to learn and act quickly. These abilities derive not only from appropriate attitudes and mindsets but also from an organization's business savvy and insights, which are the result of its proximity to business environment and other players within it. A corporate university that connects all business partners gives an organization a competitive edge against competitors without such infrastructure by allowing it to learn and demonstrate agility in a way that actively shifts the contexts rather than laboriously catches up. These business partners may include the organization's suppliers, customers, investors, and employees in its current industry and even those from its upstream and downstream industries.
Strategic networks theories (e.g., Gulati, Nohria, & Zaheer, Reference Gulati, Nohria and Zaheer2000) support this proposition. According to our definition, a corporate university helps an organization to achieve a leadership position in various strategic networks by championing formal and informal learning among all business partners. A well-designed corporate university provides content, tools, platforms, and schedules that benefit not only the host organization but also all other players in these networks. A well-functioning corporate university nurtures all forms of strategic networks by providing a forum for coexploration and coexploitation (Parmigiani & Rivera-Santos, Reference Parmigiani and Rivera-Santos2011), where knowledge sharing and creation, innovation, and transformation are enhanced. The key to realize this proposition is to achieve external ties through corporate university activities and then fully understand the market.
Proposition 2: A corporate university that functions as a learning mechanism to integrate processes of strategy making, communicating, implementing, and revising will strengthen its organization's sustainable competitive advantage
Reynolds et al. (Reference Reynolds, McCauley and Tsacoumis2018) identified clear communication and alignment across the organization as accepted wisdom for assessing senior leaders. A corporate university under our definition provides a mechanism for effective alignment not only for leader assessment but also for strategic management as a whole. This corporate university practice also solves the problem that assessment and development normally fall short of what is really needed by business strategy implementation because it integrates HRM with business operations and accelerates strategy update.
This proposition is supported by Becker and Huselid's (Reference Becker and Huselid2006) suggestions to differentiate HR architecture contingent on strategic business practices and to use strategy implementation as a mediating force in order to realize HR strategy's impact on firm performance. They argue that it is strategy implementation, or even formulation, that brings HR professionals into the strategic spheres of the organization. In order to enhance strategy implementation, the HR architecture needs to fit with strategic capabilities and business processes, and this vertical fit is regarded as the basis of HR's contribution to an organization's competitive advantage. Together, Propositions 2 and 3 align with Becker and Huselid's (Reference Becker and Huselid2006) theorizing.
Organizational learning theories also support this proposition. Some researchers emphasize the role of reflection, action, and change, seeing organizational learning as a means of strategic renewal (e.g., Crossan, Lane, & White, Reference Crossan, Lane and White1999; Edmondson, Reference Edmondson2002). They believe that learning only occurs when a firm acts differently. We argue that strategy formation, implementation and revision must be simultaneously integrated, and this integration can be perfectly made by leveraging the corporate university practices. A corporate university provides an ideal setting for these social processes among various players to take place, where past experiences can be reflected on collectively, new ideas can emerge, and strategies can be formed and revised. If a corporate university is regarded solely as a means to implement strategies, which is often the case in the literature, there is no room for it to play a role in strategic renewal. To realize this proposition, it is necessary to regard strategy formation and implementation as continuous and iterative processes and give a corporate university the legitimate role required to coordinate these processes.
Proposition 3: A corporate university that functions as a platform for talent acquisition, assignment, development and retention will strengthen its organization's sustainable competitive advantage
Reynolds et al. (Reference Reynolds, McCauley and Tsacoumis2018) describe a dilemma of integrating assessment and development for senior leaders, where the integrated approach provides potential benefits while conflicts also exist if the same assessment data are used for both decision making and developmental purposes. Our systems thinking helps to facilitate this integration because a corporate university connects all elements of the whole HR architecture and keeps track of data on an ongoing basis. Although the usage of these data may not be identified when they are collected, they will be ultimately used for continuous assessment and development at multiple levels. Decisions about leaders are made based on analyzing big data accumulated from daily practice, rather than one-time assessments. This encourages a culture of performance and synchronizes doing, learning and evaluating. Stretch assignment is a good example showing how leader assessment, assignment, and development can be integrated, and how to value leadership potential beyond competencies. This role of a corporate university is a good illustration of Becker and Huselid's (Reference Becker and Huselid2006) horizontal fit, which refers to the internal consistency and coherence within an HR architecture.
Schneider's (Reference Schneider1987) attraction-selection-attrition (ASA) model illustrates how an organization and its people mutually shape each other and the importance of recruiting the right people. A corporate university can play an important role in attracting and retaining talent. As discussed in Proposition 1, if an organization develops its strategic networks by leveraging its corporate university practice, it will benefit from its access to knowledge and talent, especially those of targeted attributes and capabilities, and increased level of person–organization fit. This proposition can be best realized when line managers and HR professionals work in close collaboration to serve common business goals and when various HR subsystems are aligned and integrated seamlessly.
Proposition 4: A corporate university that functions as an incubator to cultivate genes of action, adaptation and transformation will strengthen its organization's sustainable competitive advantage
Our systems thinking of corporate university provides one solution to two major questions asked by Reynolds et al. (Reference Reynolds, McCauley and Tsacoumis2018): (1) “If much is known about assessing and developing senior leaders, then why do so many organizations experience leadership shortages?” and (2) “Why are assessment and development efforts not driving changes in the quality of leaders ready to take on senior roles?” (pp. 644–645). One cause of this gap may be that traditional ways of assessing and developing tend to be standardized, not in tune with changing needs, and learning is not transferred into real practice due to organizational obstacles. Our systems thinking of corporate university promotes a culture of organizational learning and entrepreneurship and regards a gene of self-transformation as a major source of competitive advantage.
This is partially supported by the resource-based view, particularly by the idea of dynamic capabilities (Teece, Pisano, & Shuen, Reference Teece, Pisano and Shuen1997). Dynamic capabilities highlight a firm's ability to integrate and reconfigure internal and external competencies to address rapidly changing environments. Here we argue that organizations need to have a vision on what they want to become and which qualities define who they are. It is important for a corporate university to design learning goals to cultivate those genes that correspond to the organization's corporate identity. For example, an entrepreneurial organization needs to breed its disposition of innovation, risk taking, and pro-activeness. It is also important to be aware that previous knowledge and experience may hinder new initiatives and transformation. This justifies the importance of nurturing dynamic genes so that an organization may fine tune the balance of exploitation and exploration and remain active over time.
The ASA model (Schneider, Reference Schneider1987) also reveals the origins of organizational culture and its inertia. A corporate university provides a perfect venue to form, disseminate, and transform organizational culture, which in turn shapes how people behave and interact. It is more important for organizations to think about who they are rather than what they can learn, especially when environmental change becomes a norm and the trend accelerates. To realize this proposition, a company must aim to lead the market by defining what the market leader should become and then transform itself accordingly.
Conclusion
This commentary answers a call from Reynolds et al. (Reference Reynolds, McCauley and Tsacoumis2018) for cross-disciplinary and/or organization-level research by providing a systems thinking of a corporate university. Our framework extends a corporate university's role and positions it in the central place of strategic management to integrate holistically processes of business partnership, business strategy, HR architecture, and organizational development culture. This redefined corporate university will significantly improve senior leader assessment and development practices in terms of integrating them into the HR architecture, focusing on both leadership competencies and potential, building up leadership bench-strength, and customizing to organizational environments. We propose that leader assessment and development are embedded in, serve, and depend on an organization's HR architecture and business ecosystem. A well-designed corporate university integrates an organization's various systems and enhances its viability over time.
Reynolds, McCauley, Tsacoumis, and the Jeanneret Symposium Participants (Reference Reynolds, McCauley and Tsacoumis2018) present outcomes of the 2-day Jeanneret Symposium describing the state of the science and practice related to the assessment and development of senior leaders. They call for cross-disciplinary and/or organization-level research that examines “how organizations mature their assessment and development practices toward an integrated system embedded in a development culture” (p. 646). The purpose of this commentary is to answer this call and add to their work by proposing a systems thinking framework of organizational development where a corporate university plays a pivotal role.
Systems thinking refers to a way of understanding organizational activities where every part and every move of an organization are embedded within its internal and external environments. This draws directly from Senge's (Reference Senge1990) learning organization theory and, more generally, from systems theories in other fields such as biology, ecology, engineering, and psychology. In this framework, we situate leader assessment and development in a larger organizational context in which the HR architecture fits business strategies and operating environments in order to achieve sustainable competitive advantage and viability. Specifically, we grant a corporate university a role as an organic mechanism that enables an organization and its partners to learn, to act, and to transform in order to survive and prosper under dynamic environments. Thus, this framework goes beyond the scope of senior leader assessment and development, as it describes a full organic system where an organization is in constant interaction with its external environment, business partners, internal systems, and workforce. We believe that this framework will help to implement many concepts and suggestions made by Reynolds et al. (Reference Reynolds, McCauley and Tsacoumis2018), who emphasize the importance of multilevel, contextualized, and dynamic views of leader assessment and development. Moreover, we argue that this systems thinking may be the best way to cultivate an organization's leadership bench strength for long-term organizational development and viability.
Our logic is as follows. First, senior leader assessment and development aim to achieve business results and long-term organizational viability, but these objectives cannot be realized fully unless they are seamlessly embedded into the whole HR architecture and business ecosystems. Second, traditional thinking and the practice of employee development tend to follow time-consuming processes of identifying needs, designing or selecting interventions, implementing interventions, evaluating effects, and revising activities. This approach becomes problematic in a world of fast change and ambiguity. Third, our systems thinking emphasizes learning by doing through stretch assignments and close collaboration with all business partners, in which leaders learn key competencies specifically relevant to their unique context. This allows the organization's leadership bench strength to grow naturally from the inception. Learning and doing should not and cannot be separated in a dynamic environment. Fourth, our systems thinking aims at creating a sustainable development culture and ecosystem that embrace uncertainty, ambiguity and constant transformation. This provides an organization with a concrete infrastructure for effective leader assessment and development.
This commentary consists of two parts. In the first part, we define corporate university. In the second part, we introduce propositions about a corporate university's role in order to create a complete system for an organization that integrates its business strategy and HR architecture.
Defining a Corporate University's Role for Sustainable Organizational Competitive Advantage
Most current definitions of corporate university see it as a means to coordinate learning and development (L&D) activities in order to achieve organizational goals. Plompen (Reference Plompen2005) describes a corporate university as “the overall organizational umbrella for aligning and coordinating all learning for employees in order to achieve the organization's goals” (p. 83). Practices in corporate universities evolve over time; they have seen major shifts, from physical training centers to virtualized entity and from an emphasis on L&D to the alignment of L&D with strategic objectives. Some researchers claim that in an increasingly global and unpredictable age, the corporate university must progress from being a primarily social and knowledge transfer mechanism to facilitating organizational renewal and transformation—in effect, becoming the organization's learning laboratory (Ryan, Prince, & Turner, Reference Ryan, Prince and Turner2015). In this commentary, we define corporate university as an organic mechanism that enables an organization and its partners to learn, to act, and to transform in order to survive and prosper under dynamic environments.
Though the corporate university will take different forms and roles in different companies such as GE, Apple, Deloitte and many others, there is a growing emphasis on its role as a driver of business results. According to Fred Harburg, former chief learning officer (CLO) of Motorola University, an ideal corporate university should be able to understand the business, the customers and the competencies required so as to provide better products or services and to have a more engaged workforce. AT&T Senior Vice President and CLO John Palmer reports that they have used corporate university to facilitate postmerger integration and business transformation (Rio, Reference Rio2018).
We provide an illustrative example to further expand this concept. One company, for example, may regularly host forums or workshops and invite business partners (suppliers, customers, investors and employees) there to discuss topics of common concern, such as macro policies, industry and market trends, technology advancement, and any other issues that may have an impact on their business operation. In this way, the company can ensure that it is always at the forefront of the market, gain insights into market trends, and adjust its goals and strategies accordingly, in a timely manner. This advantage may help boost the company's reputation and provide it with a beneficial position in strategic networks. This, in turn, may help attract talented people within an informal network so that its HR professionals can recruit at an appropriate time. Similar dialogues within a company will provide information and insights into how one strategy works with current market conditions and how it should be revised. A company can also conduct experimental business activities through its corporate university to test new products or new markets and provide opportunities for people who have potential but who are not yet in formal leadership positions to manage projects. These habitual entrepreneurial trials together with its proximity to market allow a company to remain flexible and adaptive over time. These experiments take place at the corporate level and therefore should not affect business units’ financial performance. This is an institutional arrangement to ensure that experiments and innovations can be implemented. Other policies such as performance appraisal and compensation/reward systems need to be aligned with the practices. As shown in this illustrative example, all these activities can be coordinated by a corporate university, but the physical presence of a corporate university itself is not necessarily a systems thinking. Indeed, what really matters is a mechanism that organically integrates all these activities, which can be bestowed upon a corporate university.
We argue that a corporate university has great potential to drive an organization's sustainable competitive advantage if its role is organically extended. This role transformation is required by the dynamic business environments where an organization's competition boundary is blurring, and its opponents are sometimes unpredictable. In this situation, competition and collaboration are equally important between a firm and its partners including suppliers, customers, employees, and investors. The HR architecture therefore needs to fit vertically with business strategies and trends, and to align horizontally with various HR systems in order to achieve competitive advantage. Senior leaders play a critical role in this fit because they are the primary force to drive organizational change and evolution. Senior leader assessment and development serve, and depend on, the HR architecture and organizational viability, and a redefined corporate university helps this connection to happen. In the next part, we introduce four propositions that outline a corporate university's role. These proposed roles complement Reynolds et al.’s discussion on senior leader assessment and development.
Proposition 1: A corporate university that functions as a forum for collaboration among all business partners will strengthen its organization's sustainable competitive advantage
Our systems thinking of corporate university provides one answer to the critical question asked by Reynolds et al. (Reference Reynolds, McCauley and Tsacoumis2018), “How to address questions of readiness for specific future roles within the context that will exist for the role and acknowledge that context is constantly shifting?” (p. 638). Constantly shifting contexts, internal or external, require an organization to learn and act quickly. These abilities derive not only from appropriate attitudes and mindsets but also from an organization's business savvy and insights, which are the result of its proximity to business environment and other players within it. A corporate university that connects all business partners gives an organization a competitive edge against competitors without such infrastructure by allowing it to learn and demonstrate agility in a way that actively shifts the contexts rather than laboriously catches up. These business partners may include the organization's suppliers, customers, investors, and employees in its current industry and even those from its upstream and downstream industries.
Strategic networks theories (e.g., Gulati, Nohria, & Zaheer, Reference Gulati, Nohria and Zaheer2000) support this proposition. According to our definition, a corporate university helps an organization to achieve a leadership position in various strategic networks by championing formal and informal learning among all business partners. A well-designed corporate university provides content, tools, platforms, and schedules that benefit not only the host organization but also all other players in these networks. A well-functioning corporate university nurtures all forms of strategic networks by providing a forum for coexploration and coexploitation (Parmigiani & Rivera-Santos, Reference Parmigiani and Rivera-Santos2011), where knowledge sharing and creation, innovation, and transformation are enhanced. The key to realize this proposition is to achieve external ties through corporate university activities and then fully understand the market.
Proposition 2: A corporate university that functions as a learning mechanism to integrate processes of strategy making, communicating, implementing, and revising will strengthen its organization's sustainable competitive advantage
Reynolds et al. (Reference Reynolds, McCauley and Tsacoumis2018) identified clear communication and alignment across the organization as accepted wisdom for assessing senior leaders. A corporate university under our definition provides a mechanism for effective alignment not only for leader assessment but also for strategic management as a whole. This corporate university practice also solves the problem that assessment and development normally fall short of what is really needed by business strategy implementation because it integrates HRM with business operations and accelerates strategy update.
This proposition is supported by Becker and Huselid's (Reference Becker and Huselid2006) suggestions to differentiate HR architecture contingent on strategic business practices and to use strategy implementation as a mediating force in order to realize HR strategy's impact on firm performance. They argue that it is strategy implementation, or even formulation, that brings HR professionals into the strategic spheres of the organization. In order to enhance strategy implementation, the HR architecture needs to fit with strategic capabilities and business processes, and this vertical fit is regarded as the basis of HR's contribution to an organization's competitive advantage. Together, Propositions 2 and 3 align with Becker and Huselid's (Reference Becker and Huselid2006) theorizing.
Organizational learning theories also support this proposition. Some researchers emphasize the role of reflection, action, and change, seeing organizational learning as a means of strategic renewal (e.g., Crossan, Lane, & White, Reference Crossan, Lane and White1999; Edmondson, Reference Edmondson2002). They believe that learning only occurs when a firm acts differently. We argue that strategy formation, implementation and revision must be simultaneously integrated, and this integration can be perfectly made by leveraging the corporate university practices. A corporate university provides an ideal setting for these social processes among various players to take place, where past experiences can be reflected on collectively, new ideas can emerge, and strategies can be formed and revised. If a corporate university is regarded solely as a means to implement strategies, which is often the case in the literature, there is no room for it to play a role in strategic renewal. To realize this proposition, it is necessary to regard strategy formation and implementation as continuous and iterative processes and give a corporate university the legitimate role required to coordinate these processes.
Proposition 3: A corporate university that functions as a platform for talent acquisition, assignment, development and retention will strengthen its organization's sustainable competitive advantage
Reynolds et al. (Reference Reynolds, McCauley and Tsacoumis2018) describe a dilemma of integrating assessment and development for senior leaders, where the integrated approach provides potential benefits while conflicts also exist if the same assessment data are used for both decision making and developmental purposes. Our systems thinking helps to facilitate this integration because a corporate university connects all elements of the whole HR architecture and keeps track of data on an ongoing basis. Although the usage of these data may not be identified when they are collected, they will be ultimately used for continuous assessment and development at multiple levels. Decisions about leaders are made based on analyzing big data accumulated from daily practice, rather than one-time assessments. This encourages a culture of performance and synchronizes doing, learning and evaluating. Stretch assignment is a good example showing how leader assessment, assignment, and development can be integrated, and how to value leadership potential beyond competencies. This role of a corporate university is a good illustration of Becker and Huselid's (Reference Becker and Huselid2006) horizontal fit, which refers to the internal consistency and coherence within an HR architecture.
Schneider's (Reference Schneider1987) attraction-selection-attrition (ASA) model illustrates how an organization and its people mutually shape each other and the importance of recruiting the right people. A corporate university can play an important role in attracting and retaining talent. As discussed in Proposition 1, if an organization develops its strategic networks by leveraging its corporate university practice, it will benefit from its access to knowledge and talent, especially those of targeted attributes and capabilities, and increased level of person–organization fit. This proposition can be best realized when line managers and HR professionals work in close collaboration to serve common business goals and when various HR subsystems are aligned and integrated seamlessly.
Proposition 4: A corporate university that functions as an incubator to cultivate genes of action, adaptation and transformation will strengthen its organization's sustainable competitive advantage
Our systems thinking of corporate university provides one solution to two major questions asked by Reynolds et al. (Reference Reynolds, McCauley and Tsacoumis2018): (1) “If much is known about assessing and developing senior leaders, then why do so many organizations experience leadership shortages?” and (2) “Why are assessment and development efforts not driving changes in the quality of leaders ready to take on senior roles?” (pp. 644–645). One cause of this gap may be that traditional ways of assessing and developing tend to be standardized, not in tune with changing needs, and learning is not transferred into real practice due to organizational obstacles. Our systems thinking of corporate university promotes a culture of organizational learning and entrepreneurship and regards a gene of self-transformation as a major source of competitive advantage.
This is partially supported by the resource-based view, particularly by the idea of dynamic capabilities (Teece, Pisano, & Shuen, Reference Teece, Pisano and Shuen1997). Dynamic capabilities highlight a firm's ability to integrate and reconfigure internal and external competencies to address rapidly changing environments. Here we argue that organizations need to have a vision on what they want to become and which qualities define who they are. It is important for a corporate university to design learning goals to cultivate those genes that correspond to the organization's corporate identity. For example, an entrepreneurial organization needs to breed its disposition of innovation, risk taking, and pro-activeness. It is also important to be aware that previous knowledge and experience may hinder new initiatives and transformation. This justifies the importance of nurturing dynamic genes so that an organization may fine tune the balance of exploitation and exploration and remain active over time.
The ASA model (Schneider, Reference Schneider1987) also reveals the origins of organizational culture and its inertia. A corporate university provides a perfect venue to form, disseminate, and transform organizational culture, which in turn shapes how people behave and interact. It is more important for organizations to think about who they are rather than what they can learn, especially when environmental change becomes a norm and the trend accelerates. To realize this proposition, a company must aim to lead the market by defining what the market leader should become and then transform itself accordingly.
Conclusion
This commentary answers a call from Reynolds et al. (Reference Reynolds, McCauley and Tsacoumis2018) for cross-disciplinary and/or organization-level research by providing a systems thinking of a corporate university. Our framework extends a corporate university's role and positions it in the central place of strategic management to integrate holistically processes of business partnership, business strategy, HR architecture, and organizational development culture. This redefined corporate university will significantly improve senior leader assessment and development practices in terms of integrating them into the HR architecture, focusing on both leadership competencies and potential, building up leadership bench-strength, and customizing to organizational environments. We propose that leader assessment and development are embedded in, serve, and depend on an organization's HR architecture and business ecosystem. A well-designed corporate university integrates an organization's various systems and enhances its viability over time.