A concern related to Knowledge Management is born in my mind; ideas begin to take shape, activating a process of self-structuring of mental schemas stimulated by contact with the theories of Constructivism and Meaningful Learning, exposed by Jean Piaget (1946), Lev Vygotsky (1978) and Ausubel (2002), this process which produced as a result the decision to develop a construct in the managerial field, called Significant Management, related to the principles underlying these theories and their application in the context of Knowledge Management and Intelligent Organizations, based on the substantive theories of Senge, P. (1992).
The questions that I ask myself immediately relate to the way of approaching this construction; how to organize the ideas that I had in my cognitive structures, what new data this process requires and how to collect and organize them, so that they are understandable to the world of management.
The idea that emerged, then, in my thoughts corresponded to the possibility that, if there is a process that makes learning significant in human beings; in turn making the information or knowledge obtained more durable in the mind, and building on that basis, other more complex thought structures, it may also be feasible to develop a management model that is significant in a learning organization, as long as the needs, interests, expectations, knowledge and experiences of the collaborators are met.
Coincidentally, the idea was born at the time when large organizations worldwide have been surprised by a financial crisis that threatens their permanence in the market, while observing that their structural assets are not their main competitive advantage., but its great strength corresponds to the management of human capital; that is, the potential development of his intelligence and learning capacity to turn him into creative talent and capable of learning permanently collectively.
In other words, global management has recently experienced a lesson that they can take as an opportunity for improvement, learn from lived experience and intelligently overcome, in a context that generates knowledge and education, focused on the relational transformations that have occurred in the last decades, such as the globalization of trade, the permanent change of markets and the development of information and knowledge technologies.
I previously expressed in previous articles that management is a process that consists of achieving organizational goals with and through collaborators. Likewise, “to manage is to listen, think and give an answer (Mejía, 2009)”; that is, to practice active listening, which allows to detect needs and interests in internal and external clients to seek full client satisfaction. Satisfied employee, satisfied customer.
Within this framework, the Significant Management promotes the achievement of goals with the workers, taking into account their knowledge, experiences, interests and needs, achieving that the work is meaningful and its performance becomes significant for them. For the human being, what is significant is everything that is related to what he is as mind, thought, cognition and culture. Consequently, these are elements that must be considered to consider in the management, recruitment and development of personnel.
However, the possible solutions require scientific rigor to determine what their causes are, within the framework of Management, Human Capital Management and Intelligent Organizations, since it seems that these, including those aimed at forming Intellectual Capital, continue to have Difficulties in learning, endangering their survival, which could be the product of a reductionist approach on the part of those responsible for training in them, believing that competitiveness is sustained only in information and communication technologies; without thinking that by themselves it does not constitute the solution, since they must be a complementary element in the synergy of organizational systems, with another of a human nature that involves the use of intelligence,knowledge and the ability to learn.
In this regard, Rosillón, P. (2002, p. 27), maintains: "while at one time the factor of production was land and then capital, today the decisive factor is increasingly man and his knowledge". However, current management continues to claim to have everything under control, which reduces the margin for maneuver of its followers and hinders organizational learning, since its bureaucratic nature prevents staff from developing their potential autonomously and collectively, sometimes ignoring that the possibility of being competitive in the market depends on the ability to learn faster than the competitors.
Within this framework, Alles, M. (2008) indicates that in the traditional management scheme of organizations, a person leads a group of collaborators concentrating authority on the boss and subordination, without adopting an empowering philosophy that allows them act proactively, by developing autonomy. Conversely, employees adhere to the guidelines given by the manager and their freedom, opinions and abilities to carry out their own work are limited to venture into personal and organizational transformation and development.
Coincidentally, Davis and Newstrom (2002) argue that organizations learn through people; In this sense, the strategy, the structure and the systems will be effective to the extent that people feel identified with what they do, which is why it proposes the liberation of organizations to make way for thoughts, creativity, processes of learning and the potential development of its members, which would make the management process meaningful; applying a strategic management considering the dimensions: social, organizational, epistemological and technical.
As Senge, P. (2005) explains, as interconnectedness in the world grows, complexity and dynamism in business, work is increasingly linked to learning. It is no longer enough to have a person who learns for the organization, but the competitive advantage of the organization compared to others in the market is guaranteed when the members of teams become learners, from what they are as cognitive power..
The author adds that the ferment in management will continue until that moment where we build organizations that are more coherent with human aspirations and are not restricted to food, refuge and group membership to achieve knowledge cycles.
That level of understanding of what until now was only an idea, led me to carry out a profound bibliographic review that would answer these concerns, thus finding the possibility of strengthening my beliefs and shaping the cognitive character construct that I intended develop, and where the cognitive power coming from the pre-existing structures in the subject is essential.
But what is that power? Well, it is there where the Meaningful Management is activated, in order to take advantage of the potentialities, abilities and skills of each employee to make it productive. It is the cognitive power of the human being, reflected in her attitudes and actions, as a product of her expectations, experiences, knowledge, culture, background and everything pre-existing in her mind.
In any case, the manager must know that power, he must know what moves the employee to guarantee, at the same time, the full satisfaction of his interests and needs; in other words, the realization of his dreams to move him in favor of an Organizational Philosophy internalized by him in the institution; only this time, it does so from the emerging significance of its needs, interests, expectations and motivations; which is related to what he likes, knows, owns and constitutes his being; that is, what is significant to him.
That significance moves people. And that movement, proactively, autonomously and self-regulates increases labor productivity by the workers of the intelligent organization to which they belong.
In this context, the role to be played by management is important, since it has to visualize that process, when the new employee arrives at the institution, detecting their cognitive power, which is the basis of labor significance. In some cases in the training and development phases of Human Capital, Cognitive Modifiability will have to be applied to Align human minds and powers for learning.
Consequently, it is the responsibility of management to know experiences, tacit knowledge, needs, interests and what is significant for each internal client. That is the basis for encouraging them to do their best. This human strength is constituted as a valuable tool to guide efforts in the field of Intellectual Capital Management that adds value at the level of organizational productivity.
The aforementioned, is nothing more than the diversity of thoughts, feelings and actions managed in a significant way, which will be reflected in high levels of creativity and productivity, by putting interdisciplinary, on the tables of work or reflection, the various ideas and paradigms interwoven in the cognitive power of employees as a whole, reaching the level of transdisciplinarity when applying their knowledge and techniques, to give more than what is currently required. This type of Meaningful Management makes the organizations' clients, owners, managers and executives happy; as well as the employees, because she guarantees compliance with the Win-Win principle; From which everyone wins, they have satisfied customers, the organization thrives, and its members realize their dreams.
Similarly, it is important to keep in mind that we are successful through the progressive achievement of "our" goals. When it is said, “ours”, it refers to the goals of the investor and those of human capital. It is having empowered people, with the power to think and do. To think that our goals and those of the organization go together in the production process, aiming at the self-regulation of the processes of mental, procedural and attitudinal development in the organization, to make it better every day. This makes us powerful, thoughtful, thoughtful, critical, lively and productive people. It is not handing over power, because we, as human capital, already have it in our cognition; which is modifiable when circumstances require it; for example: to align staff in an organizational strategy.
From this expectation, Significant Management is practiced when human capital managers identify and value the knowledge, experiences, needs and interests of employees to carry out their tasks without the need to monitor them rigorously and permanently. They use their autonomous power to do better and better work. It is natural for human beings to do better, motivated, in confidence, when they do it from him, as a thinking and solution builder. Management will act on the basis of this cognitive power, activating it and giving it the freedom to act under strategic direction, which, due to organizational socialization, is already part of the work teams.
In the Classical Era, at the beginning of the last century, it was shown that incentives and extrinsic motivation gave few results; indeed, people are more productive when they are genuinely taken into account. It was evident that man does not work only for money; for material incentives move people less in the desired direction as managers. The ego and needs for self-realization, along with other intrinsic motivations, produce a truly significant proactive attitude in the employee, since it comes from their pre-existing structures. His vision and goals, turned into motivation, are the energy that pushes him into action.
All this source of human energy is in the mind of the human being; then, the role of management will be to detect at what level of needs, interests, knowledge, expectations and experiences is each subject and then, to detect it in each group and human capital in general. In other words, investigate what are the individual and group expectations to manage it in a meaningful way, aligning their mental models with the organizational expectations.
Hence, considering the factors of Meaningful Management is also humanizing the process of managing your human capital, creating an environment of shared purposes that makes team learning meaningful to make the organization intelligent.
These considerations led me to reflect on what would be the relevance of this research, what problem would it solve, what would be its justification, in which scenarios, in the private sector or in the public sector? What value would I add in the field of Management?; so that, through inductive-deductive processes, it was possible to get to know the answers to these questions.
The answer led me to infer that the significant would have an impact on the management of human capital in smart organizations, when it is approached as a process based on the achievement of organizational purposes with and through a significant formation of said capital; taking into account their needs, experiences, expectations and / or previous cognitive structure, which deserves to capture the deepest meaning of what learning implies, since learning with a collective and networked nature will make it possible to make mental movements towards another management model of smart human capital.
To this end, making a transfer from Ausubel's Theory of Learning, cited by Díaz and Hernández (2002), to the management field, it can be affirmed that what is significant in this process would be that the organization's human capital be managed and formed by focusing your cognitive power; that is, taking into account everything that is related to what he is as a previous cognitive structure; that is, their needs and interests, experiences, expectations and knowledge; in other words, his mental model.
For this reason, within this role of Management, a model that promotes the principles of meaningful management must be promoted, to increase the generation and transfer of cognitive skills from the pedagogical context to that of human capital management, which allows performance to become something significant for the employee, stimulating their motivation to integrate and act proactively from the individual, but always thinking as a member of an intelligent system that shares their intelligence and structural symbologies through their interactions, turning their contributions into added value and significant experiences for the development of the organization's intellectual capital.
Consequently, it is necessary to advance in the optimization of the management of the organizations applying tools that are related to the cognitive, motivational factors and participation of the work teams in lifelong learning, in such a way that the transfer processes are focused from the integrality of human capital, giving prominence to the man who builds knowledge, from an activating mental perspective of his creative power, which in turn manifests itself as an organizational learning process.
In this regard, Berán et al. (2001) express that it is necessary to promote a process of managerial transformation that capitalizes on knowledge and experience, represented in their best personnel management practices and fostering learning in the organization to solve problems typical of the entities that want to improve their level of positioning in the market.
For this reason, in the knowledge society and the ability to learn in networks, the new trend should give importance to team learning, in laboratories and conversations that encourage the voluntary participation of staff, as a result of their motivation in significant areas of organization as an intelligent entity.
De esa manera, contextualizando lo expuesto en la Universidad Privada Dr. Rafael Belloso Chacín y aprovechando el conocimiento almacenado en los diferentes órganos de la institución, con una estrategia de aprendizaje en redes y partiendo de las estructuras cognitivas previas de las personas, se asiste a los empleados para que aprendan a pensar y aprendan a aprender en equipo, aprendan a emprender, activen su creatividad y autorregulación de procesos mentales, lo cual permitirá la satisfacción de sus necesidades de desarrollo de carrera, consolidando a la institución como una organización inteligente, provista de un potencial humano capaz de compartir sus conocimientos, desarrollar aprendizaje organizacional y resolver problemas en conexión con sus pares.
It is appropriate, at this time, to take into account what Revah, J. (2006) has expressed: the Intelligent Organization is one that meets the conditions for effective organizational learning; with conditions and capacity to make conversations within and outside the company more productive, generating strategic thinking, creativity and personal initiative.
Likewise, Senge, P. (2004), maintains that the current organization tends to be an organization of knowledge and each job is occupied by someone who knows their task, who does not act as much by delegation as by expertise, and adds, the Companies that aspire to survive in the current competitive context must maintain an internal dialogue that allows them to connect with customers through external dialogue, in order to respond to their collective learning needs.
Regarding Venezuelan management and its corporate strategy, it must serve the interests of the owners of the company, but the expectations of employees should not be neglected. Each individual has their own needs and motivations for personal and professional fulfillment, their dreams and their visions. From there, from the strategy as a management principle, cognitive and motivational power is released to add value to the task performed in a significant way.
From that power, employees think, feel and act. Then, management must focus strategic planning on elements such as vision, mission and values, to impact and empower them so that they place all their human talent at the service of the company, turning the organization into a system that loves to learn.
However, in the field of smart organizations, significance should play a leading role in the Venezuelan company; because this type of organization bases its success on learning and shared vision, within a systemic framework; which requires learning to learn, learning to think, learning to undertake and building new knowledge for solving problems.
However, it seems that in the Venezuelan company this is not happening, since managers continue to lead processes in an authoritarian way, trying to innovate processes that guide the management of human capital towards the application of technological tools for information and communication; under the belief that technology is the solution to the problems of incompetence or weak positioning in the market, thereby ignoring the strength that your company has in terms of experience, potential development, previous mental structure and knowledge of human capital.
In this way, the opportunity to apply a management model where significance is key, along with talent, creativity, knowledge and total cognitive power, which supported by the aforementioned technologies, is promoting laboratories and is being lost meaningful learning networks, turning personnel and areas of organizational significance into strategic elements that confer a competitive advantage over their competitors.
Within this context, Siemens, G. (2005), conceives learning as a process of formation in networks, which is related by analogy to neural networks; that is, how our brain neurons connect to transfer information; considering transfer as that process where someone applies knowledge and experiences to learn to solve problems in new situations and in different areas or disciplines. In other words, the networks will allow employees who have knowledge in the educational area to transfer to the administrative or managerial area.
Now, what happens in regional organizations? In these, as Valecillos, C. (2008) explains, not everyone thinks, not everyone learns, but some think and others act, disregarding the principles of meaningful management, the processes of knowledge transfer and the principles of cognitive order of smart organization; ignoring that the intelligent organization begins by reviewing the previous cognitive structures, people's expectations, needs, knowledge, and then betting on the development of human talent, but based on the ability to learn collectively and solve problems inherent to company management.
That is why, in the university organizations of the Zulia State, there also seem to be difficulties that the Significant Management could intervene to solve from an intelligent organization model; implementing processes that relate to timely responses to the needs and expectations of employees in order to achieve learning that favors the institution's competitiveness.
However, for Alves, C. (2002) line managers, as well as generals, bet on control, rewarding staff when they do it well and firing them when something goes wrong; so that the majority will prefer to comply with the established, which limits the possibility of innovation in the company.
According to unsystematized observations, made by the researcher, aspects related to strategic thinking are committed to failure, since it seems that employees do not have a sense of the vision, mission and organizational values that guide the permanence of the organization in the market., by promoting behaviors that define the characteristics of an intelligent and competitive organization.
In this context, the problem seems quite complex, because if employees are asked about their performance, they always respond in terms of tasks they perform in their daily lives, they are not aware of the purposes established in the organization's strategic planning.; No idea of the strategic thinking that merits learning to align with its policies and objectives, less than the collective learning culture that is required to promote or sponsor the creation of spaces to generate knowledge.
Likewise, autonomy of action in employees is not the characteristic of these companies; they require to be permanently directed, since they act in a dependent way of their leaders; This limits the self-regulation of learning processes and the actions to be followed in their performance through creative and proactive processes to drive innovation based on their previous cognitive structures.
In this sense, Senge, P. and others (2004, p. 14), maintain that “the skills to develop to face these changes in the company of the XXI century consist of spreading power in an orderly manner based on self-discipline, which must function as an action, not from the outside but as an intrinsic factor of the employee ”. Likewise, you must bet on organizational interrelationships; that is, to systemic understanding, as well as conversations as a learning tool, taking a proactive attitude from mental models.
Consequently, regarding the use of knowledge, experiences and other elements of the previous cognitive power by the staff, it could be found that the organization under study could be functioning as intelligent organizations, but not consciously, since the training or training programs do not respond to the previous needs and structures of the staff, but the content platform is based on the expectations of the organization's leaders, affecting organizational learning.
It is inferred, then, that managers and employees do not share structural meanings to build new possibilities of success from the individual and group order, which also allows them to share a vision and learn to generate a system mind and team learning. Hence, when the principles of meaningful management are not applied, the organization goes without direction and without taking advantage of the intellectual potential of its members.
The aforementioned is apparently due to the fact that in the foreground organizations do not make efforts to socialize the purposes formulated in strategic planning and, in the background, despite the fact that there are programs for the formation and training of human capital, it is observes that the construction of knowledge is not valued collectively, rejecting the use of the cognitive potential of each worker; that is, in the execution of said processes, the knowledge, experiences and other elements of the prior cognitive power of the participants in the activities inherent in said programs are not taken into account, turning the events into attempts to develop human capital, but that the absence of significant learning processes remains only intentions.
If this management style continues to be practiced in organizations, distanced from the principles of meaningful management, ignoring the learning needs of workers, without assessing the transfer of cognitive skills and without identifying the areas of significance of intelligent organizations, then, organizations they will gradually lose competitive power and permanence in the market.
Hence, it is considered imperative to carry out research that gives rise to a meaningful management construct that approaches companies as intelligent organizations, capable of thinking, learning to learn and learning as a team, under a shared vision, intelligent to act as systems that assess the significance of employees, their motivation, participation, as well as manage the areas of that significance through conversation programs, learning laboratories and the use of networks; When the Significant Management model is implemented in the organization, the costs, as a result of its deployment, are not increased; on the contrary, as productivity levels rise, costs go down.
That productivity is increased when workers do what looks like them; what they like; what they are like thought and culture; with their life projects. It is the product of turning ordinary results into extraordinary ones; optimizing the time to think and create knowledge proactively, which leads to the growth of the organization's intellectual capital.
As a result of the research carried out, I present to the world the concept of Significant Management:
A process of cognitive restructuring that, based on significant and constructivist processes on mental models, adapts thought structures to the needs of work efficiency, taking into account what each individual or group is as cognitive power; This managerial process merits the design of a corporate strategy that establishes a tridiac relationship between mediator manager, employee and work environment, focused on the human being as an integral being who learns, thinks, does, creates, undertakes and makes a strategic decision to learn in the organization, being able to join with a propensity attitude when learning in the universal knowledge management network. (Mejía, 2012).
