Building a Learning Organization

{Excerpt} A learning organization values the role that learning can play in developing organizational effectiveness. It demonstrates this by having an inspiring vision for learning and a learning strategy that will support the organization in achieving its vision. For organizations wishing to remain relevant and thrive, learning better and faster is critically important. Many organizations apply quick and easy fixes often driven by technology. Most are futile attempts to create organizational change. However, organizational learning is neither possible nor sustainable without understanding what drives it. The figure below shows the subsystems of a learning organization: organization, people, knowledge, and technology. Each subsystem supports the others in magnifying the learning as it permeates across the system

Overcoming Roadblocks to Learning

{Excerpt} The gulf between the ideal type of a learning organization and the state of affairs in typical bilateral and multilateral development agencies remains huge. Defining roadblocks, however numerous they may be, is half the battle to removing them—it might make them part of the solution instead of part of the problem. Organizational learning is collective learning by individuals, and the fundamental phenomena of individual learning apply to organizations. However, organizational learning has distinctive characteristics concerning what is learned, how it is learned, and the adjustments needed to enhance learning. These owe to the fact that an organization is, by general definition, a collective whose individual constituents work to achieve a common goal from discrete operating and supporting units. Practices bring different perspectives and cultures to bear and shape data, information, and knowledge flows. Political considerations are the most serious impediment to becoming a learning organization. However, by understanding more fully what obstacles to learning can exist in a complex organization in a complex environment, one can circumscribe the problem space and create enabling environments for a more positive future. Such environments would facilitate self-organization, exploration of the space of possibilities, generative feedback, emergence, and coevolution.They would create an explanatory framework and facilitate action

Learning Organization and Innovation Performance in High-Tech Small Firms

The aim of this paper is to explore the influence of processes of learning in organization on innovation performance in high-tech small firms. After reviewing the literature on learning and innovation, the author defines the concepts of knowledge management, organizational learning and learning organization and how they are interlinked. Hypotheses regarding the link between learning organization and innovation are presented. An original construct, based on 6 dimensions, is derived to evaluate the degree of learning in firms. The validities (reliability, unidimensionality and convergent validity) of the construct are assessed using confirmatory factor analysis. Then, the influence on innovation is tested through structural equation modelling (SEM) on a database of 110 US high-tech small firms from different industries. Specifically, influence on product and process innovations and financial performance are tested. The first results show that the presence of learning organization orientation and learning organization processes is related to innovativeness in our sample of high-tech small firms. The results are moderated by the degree of maturity of the industries and the strategic orientation of the CEOs. The conclusive part gives ways to ameliorate the learning organization processes and thus enhancing the innovative performance

Learning Histories

{Excerpt} How can we gauge the successes and failures of collective learning? How can the rest of the organization benefit from the experience? Learning histories surface the thinking, experiments, and arguments of actors who engaged in organizational change. In the corporate world, the precedence ascribed to individual learning can run counter to organizational learning, the process by which an organization and its people develop their capabilities to create a desired future. Without doubt, developing capabilities is a precondition of a desired future; however, if the essence of a learning organization is that it actively identifies, creates, stores, shares, and uses knowledge to anticipate, adapt to, and maybe even shape a changing environment, the driving concern must be reflection, communication, and collective sense makingfor action across its personnel. (Proponents of organizational learning grumble that people in organizations perform collectively yet still learn individually from incomplete, heterogeneous information to which they ascribe different meaning.) Intra-organizational interaction for learning cannot depend on serendipity: it must be encouraged, facilitated, recognized, and rewarded. Increasingly, narration is deemed a good vessel for bridging knowledge and action in the workplace

Is there a global model of learning organizations? An empirical, cross-nation study

This paper develops and tests a learning organization model derived from HRM and dynamic capability literatures in order to ascertain the model’s applicability across divergent global contexts. We define a learning organization as one capable of achieving on-going strategic renewal, arguing based on dynamic capability theory that the model has three necessary antecedents: HRM focus, developmental orientation and customer-facing remit. Drawing on a sample comprising nearly 6000 organizations across 15 countries, we show that learning organizations exhibit higher performance than their less learning-inclined counterparts. We also demonstrate that innovation fully mediates the relationship between our conceptualization of the learning organization and organizational performance in 11 of the 15 countries we examined. It is the first time in our knowledge that these questions have been tested in a major, cross- global study, and our work contributes to both HRM and dynamic capability literatures, especially where the focus is the applicability of best practice parameters across national boundaries

Firms, Incomplete Contracts and Organizational Learning

This explorative paper argues that the central problem of economic organization is adaptation to unforeseen contingencies. However, flexibility is a rather neglected issue in the theory of economic organization. This contrasts with much organization theory, in which the seeking and processing of information about the organization's key uncertainties is seen as a determinant of organizational form. The notion of incomplete contracts is argued to provide a means to bridging ideas from organizational economics and organization theory, particularly organizational learning. Incomplete contracts are not only important because they provide room for incentive problems, but more importantly because they allow firms to exploit processes of organizational learning that must always involve some unforeseen contingencies. Firms are seen as efficient institutional responses to learning processes that involve strongly complementary problem-solving activities.The theory of economic organization, incomplete firm contracts, organizational learning, t

Interaction and effectiveness of corporate e-learning programmes

This study was conducted in a large Mexican organization running a virtual corporate university. It aimed to evaluate students’ perceptions of three types of interaction (learner–teacher, learner–content and learner–learner) and their views on the effectiveness of online courses in terms of satisfaction, learning and behaviours. Twenty-six employees who had studied at least one online course within the organization answered an online survey. Four of them were interviewed. Results show that: (1) Learners value their interaction with the content the most. (2) Online learning is generally perceived as an effective method for delivering corporate training. (3) There is no perceived relationship between online interactions and training effectiveness. The findings are limited to the specific context of the participating organization. Further research into online learning in corporate settings is needed to understand training interactions and changes in job performance

The Dissemination of Knowledge in Organizations as a Result of Multicultural Learning

The access to information means power. The organizations must learn continuously, must innovate in order to face the increasing competition. Today, the successful company is a learning organization. The dissemination of knowledge is a critical factor for the learning organization. The companies have created systems to ensure proper learning and smooth transfer of information. In this paper I showed which systems organizations are using in order to create, to manage and to disseminate the knowledge. I showed that the organizational structure is adapting to the learning organization; also the technology is a factor that stimulates the organizations to innovate. The ability of the companies to administrate the technological progress is hindered by the capability of the companies to capture and to control the tacit knowledge.knowledge dissemination; multicultural learning; technology transfer.

Learning from failure

We study decentralized learning in organizations. Decentralization is captured through a symmetry constraint on agents’ strategies. Among such attainable strategies, we solve for optimal and equilibrium strategies. We model the organization as a repeated game with imperfectly observable actions. A fixed but unknown subset of action profiles are successes and all other action profiles are failures. The game is played until either there is a success or the time horizon is reached. For any time horizon, including infinity, we demonstrate existence of optimal attainable strategies and show that they are Nash equilibria. For some time horizons, we can solve explicitly for the optimal attainable strategies and show uniqueness. The solution connects the learning behavior of agents to the fundamentals that characterize the organization: Agents in the organization respond more slowly to failure as the future becomes more important, the size of the organization increases and the probability of success decreases.Game theory

The role of learning organization in knowledge management process

The content and the organization of work represent dimensions which do not only involve mobilizing competencies but are also dimensions in which competencies are developed. In an organization people create, accumulate or transfer knowledge, ideas, values, attitudes, feelings or experiences. The goal of a learning organization is to improve competency diffusion, to enrich them and to capitalize experiences. Chaos arises when the level of learning of the enterprise reaches a point in which it can no longer deal with the changes in the environment it functions in. In this work we shall try to discuss the potential for transformation of organizations, constantly challenged, even in the world of knowledge.learning organization, active learning, knowledge management, organizational learning