ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING

Organizational Learning



Organizational Learning

Introduction

The concept of learning organization (LO) is gaining importance in academicians, scholars, and practitioners as the competition is increasing. The learning organization notion has insights, applications from different businesses and organizations: private or public. The concept of LO can be applied to educational institutions. Neefe (2001) work is an ample example of research work on identification of the universities as a learning organization. Moreover she determined few contextual factors that are necessary for the universities to be and become a learning organization.

Managers are in dire need of improving the competitiveness through meeting the customer demands, innovating new products, adopting new technology. Organizations want to capitalize on present competencies and identify, and develop new such that they become ahead of competitors improving productivity and organizational performance.

Therefore, the requirement of the present era is a more flexible, adaptable, and even proactive organizations. For all that the requirement is to learn faster than the competitors (De Geus, 1988). It is theoretically claimed that the learning organization is the organization that is capable of achieving competitive advantage (Goh, 2003; Senge, 1990). Garvin (1993) defines a leaning organization is an organization that is skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights. Scholars have different views while describing the learning in organizations. Few argue it is a process that is aimed at changing cognitive and behavioural aspect of the organization to make organization adaptable and flexible.

Defining Organizational Learning and Learning Organization

The objective of this section is to explore and define the concepts of organizational learning and learning organization. Theories and frameworks pertaining to these concepts will be discussed to identify the most important characteristics.

The learning Organization term sounds attractive to the practitioners of organizational Developments and business managers. The terms organizational leaning and the learning organizations are used interchangeably (Tsang, 1997). The activities taking place in organizations can be termed as organizational learning while a learning organization can be differentiated as the organization that is involve in deliberate efforts to improve learning in the organization. Put simply, the relationship between the two can be described as a learning organization is one which is good at organizational learning (Tsang, 1997). The concept of learning in organizations was taken as practice because of its explicit impact on organizational performance improvement. The concept under discussion is linked with and has contributions from the literature of strategy, management science, and organizational development etc. (Easterby-Smith, 1997).

Discussion

Coming paragraphs are dedicated to the discussion on the frameworks of a learning organization. A table will be formed which will help the researcher to extract the most important and common factors that can be called as facilitating factors that cause learning to occur.

This figure depicts the independent variables extracted for the proposed model of organizational learning/ Learning organization. These variables are the most discussed and frequently recommended variables of organizational learning as evidenced through literature review.

Learning organization is an HRD effort, and is considered an intervention for organizational transformation within the domain ...