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This article demonstrates how the performance improvement process, performance templates, may be used for both manager and employee learning. The paper explains the concept, offers theoretical support for it, gives evidence of the efficacy of the process, and explains, in detail, how the process may be applied.

The approach is to present or demonstrate what performance templates are and how a manager and a group of employees work together to create them and use them in the field. The paper presents the approach, explains how it connects with theory, offers empirical support for performance templates, and gives a sequence of events as to their creation and use.

The findings indicate that, in general, the learning and performance approach, performance templates offer an influential and practical tool for both manager and employee learning, and consistent performance improvement. The approach has many applications, although recent research relies mostly on its use in sales organizations.

Primarily, the performance template approach has been used with small samples of learners. In the extant studies of the approach, small sample sizes limit the value of statistical analysis.

The approach has not been tested with large employee groups (more than 25). The method is labor-intensive and time consuming. Large groups of participants would compromise the use of the approach as individual employee participation could be limited.

Performance templates add to the arsenal of tools and methods available to trainers and managers. There is some empirical support for the approach. Performance templates represent both a learning approach and a performance improvement approach as managers and their employees work jointly to create learning and change.

This paper seeks to explain how team training in template construction and maintenance is achieved to improve the performance of individuals and teams on the job. The aim is to explain the training model in detail and to present the theory base for the model. Also, another important purpose is to demonstrate how the model is actually used in the field.

The methodology consists of two major features: the explication of how the template approach is applied, in general; and then the performance of teams and groups of employees is compared following training. It shows that one group was trained in the template approach, while the other group was trained using more conventional methods.

The hypotheses stated that in comparing the differently trained teams/groups there would be no difference in performance on these measures: gross sales attained; manager rating of employee performance; and customer satisfaction with regard to sales representatives; product knowledge; helpfulness in the business context; and overall performance. Significant differences were noted for manager rating, product knowledge, and overall performance. The groups could be compared; however, the teams were too small to rely on standard statistical tools for analysis.

The study was exploratory in nature with a limited range of performance measures. The sample sizes (teams) were not large; however, the groups were large enough to make comparisons. The use of different pairs of trainers for the sub‐samples helps to dampen trainer bias but also creates differences in training conditions that could influence employee learning and performance.

The results demonstrate that the training approach has merit and warrants further study. The study depicts how a partnership among trainers, managers, and employees can lead to successful training outcomes. Another implication is that it is possible to involve trainers, teams and managers, cooperatively, to create models of training and performance improvement.

There are only a few templates or script‐based approaches reported in the training literature; hence this work adds to the literature. The template approach helps team members leverage their learning and also improve performance.

There are three purposes to this article: first, to offer a training approach to employee learning and performance improvement that makes use of a step‐by‐step process of skill/knowledge creation. The process offers follow‐up opportunities for skill maintenance and improvement; second, to explain the conceptual bases of the approach; and third, to demonstrate the efficacy of the approach as it is applied in the field.

The methodology consists of two major features: the explication of how the template approach is applied, in general; and then the performance of two groups of employees is compared following training. One group was trained in the template approach while the other group was trained using more traditional methods. Conventional performance measures were used to assess group differences.

Following training the two employee groups were compared. The hypotheses stated that there would be no differences in performance on these measures: gross sales attained; manager rating of employee performance; and customer satisfaction with regard to sales representative's; product knowledge; helpfulness in the business context; and overall performance. Significant differences were noted for manager rating, product knowledge, and overall performance.

This study was exploratory in nature with a limited range of performance measures. The sample sizes were not large. The use of different pairs of trainers for the sub‐samples helps to dampen trainer bias but helps create differences in training conditions that could influence employee learning and performance.

Study results demonstrate that the training approach has merit and warrants further study. The study depicts how a partnership among trainers, managers, and employees can lead to successful training outcomes.

The training approach has substantial implications for management development regarding learning and change. The template approach adds to the repertoire of training methods. It also helps to reinforce the growing body of research that bases learning and performance improvement on script‐based methods.

This paper sets forth a description and explanation of how action theory serves as the foundation for the training and performance management approach, performance templates (P‐T). In recent years the efficacy of performance templates, given its limitations, has been demonstrated; however, the theory base for the P‐T approach had not been sufficiently developed. This paper aims to examine the content and efficacy of performance templates.

The P‐T method is set forth in detail with some examples. The theoretical bases of the P‐T approach, a training and development partnership among trainers, managers, and employees, are explained in detail.

The layered features of the action theory of Michael Frese fit very well with the interpersonal and intrapersonal events that make up the creation and use of performance templates. The P‐T method requires considerable mental work and the action theory helps explain the cognitive events that occur.

The paper sets forth the features of action theory, especially the foundation for metacognitive heuristics, that is, the short‐cut reasoning tools that individuals use to aid decision making. Aside from the application of the P‐T approach, this paper offers trainers a set of examples regarding how the trainer may influence learning by attending to the dynamics of metacognitive heuristics and cognitive style, concepts that have received very little attention in the training literature.

Action theory offers many features that help explain the regulation of learning and behavior. The template approach not only adds to the repertoire of training methods, it helps to illuminate the high‐order cognitive functioning that helps individuals regulate their learning and performance.

The purpose of the article is to offer a brief introduction and description of the performance template approach to training, performance improvement, and employee and manager development. The approach has been empirically examined and has demonstrated effectiveness in learning and performance improvement.

The article is designed to explain what the performance template activity intends to achieve, offer the several steps in the performance improvement process, and to give some practical examples of the approach in the field.

No specific empirical findings are presented in this article, however, the references provided do contain complete information on the creation and use of the performance template approach in the field.

The performance template (P‐T) approach gives managers and other organization members a means for creating new practices that can assist and inform participants in the areas of knowledge creation, skill building and performance improvement. The P‐T processes do not require any special expertise; a manager can implement the processes on her/his own, although the process is somewhat labor intensive.

Social implications of this work are limited to the influence on the quality of life in the organization as the employees and managers have opportunities to enhance the effectiveness of their performance.

Taken by individual segment, the P‐T approach is not new; however, the segments in combination provide a set of processes that when executed skillfully may influence employee learning and performance as well as help managers develop important skills.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a detailed, theoretical underpinning for the training and performance improvement method: performance template (P‐T). The efficacy of P‐T, with limitations, has been demonstrated in this journal and in others. However, the theoretical bases of the P‐T approach had not been well‐developed. The other purposes of this paper are to: explain the features and functions of the P‐T and to highlight the action theory of Frese as the theory supports P‐T and offers trainers some information regarding the regulation of feedback and learning. This paper adds to the procedures and practices of human resource development.

The approach in this paper is to explain how a training and development partnership among trainers, managers, and employees is forged so as to create P‐T for use in the field. The main aspect of the methodology was to attempt to map the elements of action theory onto the specific steps (phases) of the P‐T approach. This mapping activity was achieved.

The key findings in this study is that action theory offers a hierarchical and reasonably complete explanation of how learning occurs and how individuals regulate what they know. As explained in this paper action theory provides a map of the cognitive elements in the training model employed.

Assuming that the P‐T approach has value, it is important to demonstrate how theory helps to ground the approach. In this paper, action theory has been used to offer a substantial foundation for the P‐T approach. In addition, action theory helps trainers to examine learning, feedback, and regulation of performance in a comprehensive manner.

Action theory offers several features that help explain the regulation of learning and behavior, yet the theory has received very little attention in formal literatures. Value: the template approach adds to our repertoire of training methods. This paper helps to better explain the approach and it offers useful theories to support practice.

Much has been written about self-regulated learning (SRL) (including mind-sets) in psychology and education, but little research is found in the HRD or training literature regarding the stimulation of this learning. This paper aims to present a practical training tool, performance templates (P-T), to demonstrate how a line manager may assist employees improve their problem-solving skills as well as stimulate SRL.

Presented are literature reviews and assessments of the areas of: line manager in coaching role, SRL theory and the phases of SRL in action. Following is a detailed explanation and demonstration of the P-T method. Finally, the efficacy of PT is examined and constraints are noted.

Demonstrated in the paper is how a line manager may function as the key actor in assisting employees to become more effective self-regulating learners and problem-solvers. The method presented can stimulate employee motivation and help employees to internalize self-regulating learning processes. All of this should help employees become more growth-oriented, self-confident and goal-directed participants in organizational life.

Rather than simply discuss what SRL is about, this paper provides an effective tool, P-T, for use in the stimulation and direction of SLR. The use of the tool also helps organization participants to achieve progress on some current problems.

This paper aims to complement an earlier article (2010) in Journal of European Industrial Training in which the description and theory bases of scenistic methods were presented. This paper also offers a description of scenistic methods and information on theory bases. However, the main thrust of this paper is to describe, give suggested uses for, and then to examine the empirical research already conducted on three scenistic methods: skill charting, case‐based modeling and performance templates. The thrust of the research review is to examine the efficacy of each of the three methods.

Following the descriptive information regarding scenistic methods in‐general, each of the three specific methods (see above) are explained in detail as they might be used in training practice. Then, for each method, samples of the extant empirical research attendant to the method is examined.

With regard to the empirical research presented in the paper it is found that in most practical applications of the methods, employees trained with scenistic methods out‐perform employees trained with more conventional methods on some if not most of the variables under examination. The findings demonstrate that scenistic methods clearly have promise, although statistical precision is compromised owing to small sample sizes.

Studying the effects of different forms of training in these studies is constrained because the very nature and design of scenistic training approaches limits the number of trainees that can be included in a group. In brief, this means that results of use of conventional statistical tools demonstrate less sensitivity to group‐to‐group differences in performance. It is much easier to demonstrate statistical significance if comparing large groups of 60 or more individuals, each. Regardless, comparisons of groups in the reported studies demonstrate significant differences in performance following training on most variables.

Overall, scenistic methods show much promise for use by training practitioners as the available empirical research, in the field, demonstrates their value.

The paper groups together the findings of use of a variety of scenistic methods of training. There has been practically no research reported in recent years of the efficacy of methods such as these that use cases, incidents, stories, etc. to ground training and practice.

Strategic alliances among organizations are some of the central drivers of innovation and economic growth. However, the discovery of alliances has relied on pure manual search and has limited scope. This paper proposes a text-mining framework, ACRank, that automatically extracts alliances from news articles. ACRank aims to provide human analysts with a higher coverage of strategic alliances compared to existing databases, yet maintain a reasonable extraction precision. It has the potential to discover alliances involving less well-known companies, a situation often neglected by commercial databases.

The proposed framework is a systematic process of alliance extraction and validation using natural language processing techniques and alliance domain knowledge. The process integrates news article search, entity extraction, and syntactic and semantic linguistic parsing techniques. In particular, Alliance Discovery Template (ADT) identifies a number of linguistic templates expanded from expert domain knowledge and extract potential alliances at sentence-level. Alliance Confidence Ranking (ACRank)further validates each unique alliance based on multiple features at document-level. The framework is designed to deal with extremely skewed, noisy data from news articles.

In evaluating the performance of ACRank on a gold standard data set of IBM alliances (2006–2008) showed that: Sentence-level ADT-based extraction achieved 78.1% recall and 44.7% precision and eliminated over 99% of the noise in news articles. ACRank further improved precision to 97% with the top20% of extracted alliance instances. Further comparison with Thomson Reuters SDC database showed that SDC covered less than 20% of total alliances, while ACRank covered 67%. When applying ACRank to Dow 30 company news articles, ACRank is estimated to achieve a recall between 0.48 and 0.95, and only 15% of the alliances appeared in SDC.

The research framework proposed in this paper indicates a promising direction of building a comprehensive alliance database using automatic approaches. It adds value to academic studies and business analyses that require in-depth knowledge of strategic alliances. It also encourages other innovative studies that use text mining and data analytics to study business relations.

Rolling out lean operations practices in MNCs’ plants is a complex knowledge transfer process whose design and implementation, though critical to operations performance, to date has not been investigated by operations management, international business, strategy, and organizational design research. Applying conceptual tools drawn from various theoretical approaches to knowledge management, transfer and diffusion, this exploratory study: (a) classifies and interprets lean roll-out processes in MNCs, framing them in terms of (i) knowledge replication strategies (template vs. principles-based), (ii) decentralization of decision making (degree of plant autonomy), and (iii) type of organizational ambidexterity (structural vs. contextual) underlying the process; (b) develops, through seven case studies of lean roll-outs in MNCs’ plants, three testable propositions about what might enhance the lean roll-out process performance, arguing about the individual and combined effect of the three above mentioned dimensions on lean roll-out effectiveness and efficiency. We posit that an approach characterized by principles-based knowledge replication, larger decentralization, and prevalence of contextual ambidexterity positively impacts on roll-out process performance.