ORGANIZATION

Organizational Development and Learning



Organizational Development and Learning

Introduction

'The learning organisation is a metaphor with its roots in the vision of and the search for a strategy to promote individual self-development within a continuously self-transforming organization'.

Many theories have impacted on the way how organizations and individuals learn. Starkey, Tempest and McKinlay describes the process of learning organization as a metaphor, with its' roots in the vision and to search strategies which promotes individual self-development within a continuous self-transforming organization' (Starkey, K., 2004). This quote explains that organizations strive to implement continuous innovation towards learning as whole, as well as individuals.

Aims

This essay covers four different learning methods and theorists; Chris Argyris and Donald Schon, covering the topic of single and double-loop learning; Ivan Pavlov, in regards to Classical Conditioning; Tsoukas and Vladimirou, which talks about learning in a social manner; and finally, Nonaka and Takeuchi; explaining the method of tacit and explicit knowledge.

Each topic covered within the essay also contains various organisations in relation towards the theory. Towards of the end of the essay, you should have a wider knowledge upon organisational learning.

Organization development Theory

One theory that easily simple to relate to an organisation context is with the use of Chris Argyris and Donald Schon's theory of 'Single and Double-learning'. For Argyris and Schon learning involves the detection and correction of error (Argyris, C. et al, 1978:2). Where something goes wrong, it is suggested, an initial port of call for many people is to look for another strategy that will address and work within the governing variables (Argyris, C. et al, 1974). In other words, when a problem occurs, an individual or group will seek to find a strategy to correct the problem.

According to Argyris and Schon, this is single-loop learning. Another response is to question to different problems themselves, and then to subject them to critical analysis. This they describe as double-loop learning.

Although it is suggested that organisations should adapt to double-loop learning in order to correct their errors, there are still a large amount of organisations which only adapt to single-loop learning as their correcting method. For example, one can experience within a sales company (Pro-Sales/Cobra Corporation), most employees's struggled to sell their goods because they only experimented with a small amount of selling techniques, and regularly used the techniques which created successful sales for themselves as an individual.

According to Robbins, S. et al, leading organisations such as BP fuel and Electronic Arts implement double-loop learning and form long term strategies towards the majority of their plans hence their successful growth of the organisation, whereas smaller organisations will only implement single-loop learning in order to deal with their errors (Robbins, S. et al, 2004: 583). For example, a local cake store will bake a different variety of cakes to sell. As time passes, most of the cake store will stop the production of a poor selling cake, but a continuous learning cake store, will seek external advice such as taking consumer suggestions in order to gain ...