Knowledge or Skills: Which Do Administrators Learn from Experience?

Is increased knowledge or enhanced skills the primary result of learning from experience? This study addresses this question by examining the effects of experience of administrators and the average experience of the administrators' units on four aspects of information-processing performance: need for breadth of information, need for depth of information, receiving more information than needed, and receiving less information than needed. That is, the administrator is viewed as an individual learner operating within an ecology of other learning administrators.Researchers have assumed that skills (information processing abilities gained from learning by doing) are more important than knowledge (the relatively formal and established facts, rules, policies, and procedures within the organization) in predicting how the individual and context effects of experience affect administrators' information-processing performance. However, using a survey of administrators in a multi-unit organization ( N = 415), it is demonstrated that a model that assumes that knowledge is the primary intervening variable between experience and enhanced information processing correctly predicts both the individual and context effects of experience on information processing, such as the negative relationship between individual experience and the need for breadth and depth of information and getting less information than needed, and the negative relationships between average experience of an administrators' unit and receiving more information than needed. A model based on skills-acquisition as the primary intervening variable between experience and information-processing performance predicts contrary, and hence incorrect, results, leading us to conclude that knowledge is the primary result of experience for administrators. The experience/knowledge relationship is argued to have implications for understanding worker satisfaction and the liability of newness.