Importance of a Learning Organizations

Importance of a Learning g Organizations

 A learning organization is an organization skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights (Garvin ,1993)

A learning organization obtains, develops and transfers the knowledge to facilitate the individuals and incorporate them to the organization by amending behaviors and practices of its members (Appelbaum & Reichart, 1998; Leitch, 1996; Huber, 1991).

Learning organization can be further illustrated as to be market-oriented, having a more organic and flexible structure with commercialized culture and aiding leadership (Lundberg, 1995; Luthans, 1995; Watkins and Marsick, 1996).

These kinds of organizations modify continuously to fit into a particular company accordingly and therefore can be recognized as developing its potentials steadily to build up its future (Senge, 1990)

The evolution of the three organizational paradigms focuses on the three crucial facets of all the organizations; efficiency, effectiveness, and learning.

A snapshot of organizational evolution (Weber, 1947; Drucker, 1964; Senge, 1990)

Following subsystems of a learning organization assist each other by infiltrating across the system to augment the learning process.

Building a learning organization; adopted from Serrat, (2017)

McKinsey 7-S framework

Clearly illustrates the seven S-criteria. However it’s lacking the most important S- synergistic teams where individuals learn together demonstrating a cumulative intelligence level than the sum of the intelligence of the individual members (Hitt, 1995).

Framework for the learning organization; Adapted from the McKinsey 7-S framework Kaplan & Norton, (1992)

Eight characteristics of the traditional versus the learning organization (Hitt, 1995)

Why it’s needed? 

The concepts of the learning organizations can be integrated by the leaders and managers to tackle the troublesome situations and to develop their respective organizations (Giesecke & McNeil, 2004)

Two major reasons that emphasize the significance of learning organizations

• Survival- learning process should be equivalent or greater than the environmental change in order to survive 
•       Excellence- struggling for outstanding accomplishments

      (Revans, 1982)

Intel as a learning organization

Intel is an American global technology company, largest semiconductor chip maker in the world. Intel’s leadership program offers an innovative, comprehensive leadership development process utilizing unique learning methods over a five-month period. Participants are held accountable to apply new leadership behaviors on the job. As a result, several participants reported that they experienced leadership development, growth, and personal transformation (Carter et al., 2005).

NIFS as a learning organization

NIFS focuses on developing and using its research information and knowledge capabilities in order to create higher-valued information and knowledge, to change behaviors, and to improve bottom-line results. As an institute it has a degree of goal divergence, tolerance of dissent, openness to outside ideas and desire to do better. NIFS has a commitment to knowledge and also it has given the freedom to experiment, tolerance of errors.

Conclusion

A learning organization is one which improves its knowledge and understanding of itself and its environment over time, by facilitating and making use of the learning of its individual members. In essence, a learning organization is one that is continually getting smarter, in a never-ending cycle.

References

Appelbaum, S. H., & Reichart, W. (1998). How to measure an organization’s learning ability: The facilitating factors—Part II. Journal of Workplace Learning, 10 (1), 15–28.

Baker, W. E., & Sinkula, J. M. (1999). The synergistic effect of market orientation and learning orientation on organizational performance. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 27 (4), 411–427.

Carter, L., Ulrich, D., &Goldsmith, M. (2005). Best practices in leadership development and organizational change: How the Best Companies Ensure Meaningful Change and Sustainable Leadership. San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.

Day, G. S. (1994). The  capabilities of market-driven organizations. Journal of Marketing, 58, 37–52

Dickson, P. R. (1996). The static and dynamic mechanics of competition: A comment on Hunt and Morgan’s comparative advantage theory. Journal of Marketing, 60, 102–106.

Weber, M. (1947), The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Oxford University Press, New York, NY.