Political Relatedness: the Fusion of Emotion and Politics in Action-based Learning

Many studies of learning have explored the impact of learning within organizations. This paper examines the impact of organization on learning. Organizational development interventions rarely pay attention to the emotional and political dynamics of organizational learning, even though the way people organize learning is intricately interwoven with emotion and politics. The aim of this paper is to explain how the emotions and politics mobilized by learning both encourage and prevent learning and development strategies, choices and outcomes. The study shows how the organization of learning is likely to produce a dual outcome. On one hand, organizations employ methods that are designed to integrate learning within the everyday practice of individuals and groups. On the other hand, these methods also mobilise and clarify political limitations on learning. I introduce and explain the concept of ‘political relatedness’ within organizations (the interplay between collective emotions and organizational politics/ dynamics). I use a number of examples from ‘action learning’ to illustrate and further explore political relatedness. My study focuses on four groups of Senior Managers (30 individuals) from public and private organizations and their attempts to learn about leadership and to improve their practice. Action learning was seen as one way of encouraging senior managers to reflect on the demands of their jobs at the same time as providing an environment for individual and organizational learning. Managers bring many ideas, emotions, relations and politics into an action learning set. Here I argue that the acknowledgement of this personal and institutional emotional complexity makes it possible to perceive and to engage with power relations that are easily ignored. My general aim was to investigate the ways in which political relatedness is (re)created within and outside of action learning sets. This information contributes to our knowledge about the politics and emotions that are mobilised within action learning sets, as well as how this knowledge can be applied back into the (action learning) method as critique.