Group composition at companies : How should multinational companies group employees for internal courses?
Abstract: Group composition is common in education and is fairly well examined at a school level but not within competence development in a working environment. How should a group of coworkers be grouped when attending a course? This can be a complicated question, especially at a big company such as Atlas Copco which has employees from all over the world. The main object with this report is to find which aspects has to be taken into account when putting people together in groups at a multinational company and secondly give a proposal to Atlas Copco for how the groups should be constructed in the company. The data collected for this report was gathered mostly during the two focus group discussions that were held by the researchers. This material was complemented with interviews held before and after the focus groups meetings, to get a more profound picture of the company. The outcome of the interviews and discussions were then compared with relevant literature on the subject, to be able to make an analysis on the important factors. Findings from the analysis shows that language and previous knowledge are limiting factors and should therefore determine if a person is allowed to attend a certain course. The more knowledge the course participants have in the subject and how well the participants understand the spoken language, the more information exchange will occur between the teacher and course participants. Geographical cultural differences were found to have a slight importance when designing groups but not so significant that special action has to be taken. Combining or keeping separate departments apart during a course were found to be a question on whether or not the different subcultures at the company could be mixed or not. In this case the informants in the research believed it was more beneficial for the company to mix, to prevent the subcultures to grow in separate ways. The conclusion is that the most important aspect of a group constellation are the language and previous knowledge in the subject of the course. This must therefore be taken in consideration when designing a group in a multinational company, if the goal of the course is to efficiently spread information to and among the participants. If an additional aim with the course is to make the participants learn to know other departments’ way of working it should be considered to have quotas for different departments to make the group heterogeneous in this way to enable for the participants to learn from each other.
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