Browsing by Author "Rytkönen, Helka"

Target: Organizations face challenges as the aim to develop their employees for future needs in a constantly changing operational environment. They also expect their own employees to take an active role in developing their own competencies. The social capital offered by one's social networks has a key role when it comes to competence and advices needed for one's work and for supporting individual development. Organization may also develop as different kinds of actors meet and share their knowhow at the same time mediating ideas from one context to another. This thesis targets to understand what kind of networks individuals utilize in their work to get the resources they need in different kind of situations where competencies or advice are needed from others. It also examines the diversity of individual's network ties and tries to understand what kind of other actors i.e. alters mediate new ideas in these networks. These can also be beneficial for the organization as a whole. Methods: For this thesis five individuals working in managerial positions where interviewed with the combination of theme interview and egocentric interview methods. This aimed to describe the structure and qualitatively study the resources the networks provided for these individuals. Theory driven content analysis was used to qualitatively analyse the data and to support it, methods aimed to analyse the structure of egocentric networks were used. Results and conclusions: Competence and advice networks offered individuals diversified knowhow, means of solving problems and opportunities for coaching discussions. Based on informants views, alters had become part of the network due to qualities of the tie between them and alter, and based on attributes of the alter themselves. They also saw organization's structural factors and forums offering possibilities for encountering to have some affects on it as well. New ideas seemed to come from alters with fresh way thinking and a positive approach to change, who were able to influence others thinking and mediate diversified experiences across fields of expertise. Based on the results, one may suggest organizations can support employees to create these networks and thereby mediate diversified knowhow, if they create opportunities in everyday work for encountering across functional boundaries and encourage employees to co-operate to share experiences across industrial boundaries.