LEARNING IN ORGANIZATION

Leaning in Organization

Leaning in Organization

Introduction

The concept of a learning organization (LO) is gaining importance in academicians, scholars, and practitioners as the competition are 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, 142-164) 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 modern technology. Organizations want to capitalize on existing 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, 62-81). It is theoretically claimed that the learning organization is the organization that is competent of achieving competitive advantage (Goh, 2003; Senge, 1990, 575-583). Garvin (1993, 78-92) 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 divergent views while describing the learning in organizations. Few argue it is a process aimed at changing cognitive and behavioural aspect of the organization to make organization adaptable and flexible. Few others prescribe contextual factors that facilitate or hinder learning and create competitive advantage.

Defining Organizational Learning and Learning Organization

The learning Organization term sounds attractive to the practitioners of organizational Developments and business managers. The terms organizational leaning and the learning organizations use interchangeably. 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. The concept of learning in organizations taken as practice because of its explicit impact on organizational performance improvement. The concept under discussion linked with and has contributions from the literature of strategy, management science, and organizational development etc. (Easterby-Smith, 1997, 63-71). Especially in and after the Senge (1990) who proposed the concept of a learning organization and presented few disciplines that declared necessary conditions for learning to occur. Many others like McGill and Slocum (1992, 4-17), Goh (1998, 575-583), Gephart and Marsick (1997, 34-41) etc. also gave similar prescriptions for learning in organizations and identified and presented contextual factors that are responsible for learning to occur. Coming paragraphs are dedicated to the discussion on the frameworks of a learning organization.

Learning organization is an HRD effort, and considered an intervention for organizational transformation within the domain of organizational development. Cyert and March (1963, 74-92) can be referred as the pioneers to the concept ...