With the decline of some well-established firms, the diminishing competitive power of many companies in a burgeoning world market, and the need for organizational renewal and transformation, interest in organizational learning has grown. Senior managers in many organizations are convinced of the importance of improving learning in their organizations. This growth in awareness has raised many unanswered questions: What is a learning organization? What determines the characteristics of a good learning organization (or are all learning organizations good by definition)? How can organizations improve their learning? In the literature in this area, authors have used different definitions or models of organizational learning or have not defined their terms.1 Executives have frequently greeted us with comments like these:
- “How would I know a learning organization if I stumbled over it?”
- “You academics have some great ideas, but what do I do with a mature, large organization on Monday morning?”
- “I’m not sure what a good learning organization is, but you should not study us because we are a bad learning organization.”
Our research is dedicated to helping organizations become better learning systems. We define organizational learning as the capacity or processes within an organization to maintain or improve performance based on experience. Learning is a systems-level phenomenon because it stays within the organization, even if individuals change. One of our assumptions is that organizations learn as... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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