Peer Learning Summary

Essay by ahennisUniversity, Bachelor'sB, November 2014

download word file, 2 pages 0.0

Andrew Hennis

2:00 PM Section

Summary of Academic Research Article

May 7, 2014

Learning From Peers: Knowledge Transfer and Sales Force Productivity Growth

Tat Y. Chan, Jia Li, and Lamar Pierce

Published: October 2012 into The Marketing Science Journal

This research paper successfully explains how peers in the workplace can impact the productivity of fellow sales people. This particular paper uses an example of selling cosmetics in a department store. It was found that peer-based learning is much more helpful and efficient than learning by doing for most employees. Additionally employees forgot a lot less information when it was taught to them by their peers and it also increases the long-term productivity growth of new sales people.

Next the article goes into more specifics on this idea and situation. According to the text it is incredibly important for new sales people to work with very productive workers when they first start.

This allows the bar to be set fairly high and new employees can begin to see what is expected of them and how much work is going to be needed to be put into the job. The paper does not claim to have information about how the brain processes learning but instead just the differences between learning from an outside peer as opposed to a peer inside the organization. These differences indicate that most sales people are able to learn from the active teaching of peers within the organization as well as through observation of peers outside the organization.

After this the text begins to discuss the relationship between peer-based learning and compensation. This study showed that it is likely that rewards and other incentives significantly impact a salesperson effort towards both learning, and teaching. In general employees that were paid more and given more rewards were more likely...