Participation in Corporate University Training: Its Effect on Individual Job Performance

Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences, Dec 2004 by Morin, Lucie, Renaud, Stéphane

Corporate University Training

Origin

It appears that the first corporate university was created in the United States in the 1920s by General Motors when it acquired a night school that trained workers from the automobile industry. The General Motors Institute (GMI) served General Motors exclusively for 56 years. Its main focus was on engineering and management skills. In 1982, the GMI became a private and independent college and in 1997 its name was changed to Kettering University.

It took more than two decades before other corporate universities were created. In the early 1950s, General Electric implemented its own university in Crotonville, New York. In order to engineer a massive restructuring requiring new managerial talent, "a major effort was launched to design an advanced management curriculum and build ... a campus-like setting in Ossining, New York" (Tichy, 1989, p. 100). What made the Crotonville experience different from typical training is that its birth was a CEO-driven initiative, and the fact that it was used as a lever for higher individual and organizational effectiveness. To better capture post-World War II market opportunities, the CEO in place at the time believed that new managerial skills had to be acquired in order to run the decentralized business that was planned.

In the following decades, especially in the late 1980s, other major corporations around the world also implemented their own corporate universities under various labels. For instance, in Canada, there is the Bank of Montreal Institute for Learning and the Eaton School of Retailing; in the United States, to name a few, AT&T School of Business and Technology, Coca-Cola Company Learning Center, Federal Express Leadership Institute, Disney Institute, Motorola University, Sprint University of Excellence, and Xerox Management Institute; and in Europe, Université AXA, Université Danone, Lufthansa School of Business, and Ericsson Management Institute. The emergence of the corporate university in parallel with regular training activities might be explained by the fact that managers and employees deal with complex issues. Offering a global and structured training plan rather than focusing on isolated actions, corporate university training represents a better tool than regular training when it comes to adapting the entire organization to the constant changes required to survive in the new business environment.

Characteristics

This section presents key characteristics of corporate university training that highlight how this approach is different from traditional training. This review sheds light on the concept of the corporate university and provides valuable information for future research.

A review of the rather sparse literature available on the topic reveals that there is no one commonly accepted definition of corporate university training. This can probably be explained by the fact that corporate university programs vary to some extent from organization to organization. The following presents some definitions that we believe capture the essence of what the concept of corporate university training encompasses. Martel (2001) argued that a corporate university is a means for organizational transformation that is used to develop knowledge and skills, implement organizational changes and strategies, and share corporate vision and values. This definition is consistent with Panczuk (2001) who suggested that a corporate university is a strategic tool to be used to develop, reinforce, and share an organization's culture as well as a place (virtual or physical) to exchange, reflect, and challenge ideas. Along the same lines, Meister (1998) added that the corporate, university represents a strategic action aimed at developing and educating the value chain of the organization-namely employees, customers and suppliers-in order to sustain a competitive advantage.