Corporate Education and Leadership Development in Multisite Organizations

Nowadays in the business world, changes occur faster and faster. Learning in the organizational context turns into Corporate Education (CE), defined as a set of continuous educational strategies aimed at developing competences for business. Leadership development is an organizational need; therefore, many companies structure educational programs through different strategies and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) applications. The objective of this research is to identify strategies and ICT that have been used in corporate education for leadership development in multisite organizations. The research was exploratory and qualitative, based on interviews in twelve companies located in the metropolitan region of Porto Alegre (the capital of the Brazilian state Rio Grande do Sul), with 24 people interviewed in total. The results indicate that the majority of the companies have not yet adopted the C approach as a whole. The most used strategies for teaching and learning are lectures and debates. Face to face training dominates and ICT use is limited, basically the technologies used are Virtual Learning Environments and Web 2.0 tools. The main challenge for leadership development in these multisite companies is learning and dissemination of their organizational culture.