TY - JOUR
T1 - Storytelling as a Tool for Vicarious Learning among Air Medical Transport Crews
AU - Myers, Christopher G.
N1 - Funding Information:
I am indebted to the flight nurses and leadership of AirMedPro, and to many others throughout the air medical transport industry, for sharing their stories and experiences with me. I thank Editor Christine Beckman and three anonymous reviewers for providing thoughtful, developmental feedback throughout the review process and Joan Friedman for impeccable editorial guidance and support. I am grateful for guidance and advice from Wayne Baker, Kathleen Sutcliffe, Jane Dutton, Scott DeRue, Amir Ghaferi, and Jim Westphal, as well as for insightful conversations with, and encouragement from, Ashley Hardin, Kira Schabram, Suntae Kim, Matthew Karlesky, Anna Mayo, Kristina Workman, and many others. This work also benefitted from many helpful comments and suggestions from session participants at various conferences and seminars, including at the University of Michigan ICOS seminar, where an earlier version of this paper was co-recipient of the 2016 Likert Dissertation Paper Award. Any remaining errors are my own.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2021.
PY - 2022/6
Y1 - 2022/6
N2 - Learning vicariously from the experiences of others at work, such as those working on different teams or projects, has long been recognized as a driver of collective performance in organizations. Yet as work becomes more ambiguous and less observable in knowledge-intensive organizations, previously identified vicarious learning strategies, including direct observation and formal knowledge transfer, become less feasible. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with flight nurse crews in an air medical transport program, I inductively build a model of how storytelling can serve as a valuable tool for vicarious learning. I explore a multistage process of triggering, telling, and transforming stories as a means by which flight nurses convert the raw experience of other crews’ patient transports into prospective knowledge and expanded repertoires of responses for potential future challenges. Further, I highlight how this storytelling process is situated within the transport program’s broader structures and practices, which serve to enable flight nurses’ storytelling and to scale the lessons of their stories throughout the entire program. I discuss the implications of these insights for the study of storytelling as a learning tool in organizations, as well as for revamping the field’s understanding of vicarious learning in knowledge-intensive work settings.
AB - Learning vicariously from the experiences of others at work, such as those working on different teams or projects, has long been recognized as a driver of collective performance in organizations. Yet as work becomes more ambiguous and less observable in knowledge-intensive organizations, previously identified vicarious learning strategies, including direct observation and formal knowledge transfer, become less feasible. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with flight nurse crews in an air medical transport program, I inductively build a model of how storytelling can serve as a valuable tool for vicarious learning. I explore a multistage process of triggering, telling, and transforming stories as a means by which flight nurses convert the raw experience of other crews’ patient transports into prospective knowledge and expanded repertoires of responses for potential future challenges. Further, I highlight how this storytelling process is situated within the transport program’s broader structures and practices, which serve to enable flight nurses’ storytelling and to scale the lessons of their stories throughout the entire program. I discuss the implications of these insights for the study of storytelling as a learning tool in organizations, as well as for revamping the field’s understanding of vicarious learning in knowledge-intensive work settings.
KW - groups and teams
KW - hospitals and health care
KW - knowledge management
KW - learning
KW - storytelling
KW - vicarious learning
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U2 - 10.1177/00018392211058426
DO - 10.1177/00018392211058426
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85119265032
SN - 0001-8392
VL - 67
SP - 378
EP - 422
JO - Administrative Science Quarterly
JF - Administrative Science Quarterly
IS - 2
ER -