A learning organization is the term given to a company that facilitates the learning of its members and continuously transforms itself.
Learning organizations develop as a result of the pressures facing modern organizations and enables them to remain competitive in the business environment.
A learning organization has five main features;
• systems thinking,
• personal mastery,
• mental models,
• shared vision
• And team learning.
The Learning organization concept was coined through the work and research of Peter Senge and his colleagues.
It encourages organizations to shift to a more interconnected way of thinking. Organizations should be-come more like communities that employees can feel a commitment to. They will work harder for an organization they are committed to
Characteristics
There is a multitude of definitions of a learning organization as well as their typologies. According to Peter Senge, a learning organization exhibits five main characteristics: systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, a shared vision, and team learning.
1. Collaborative Learning Culture (Systems Thinking)
A successful learning organization is supported by a collaborative learning culture. Every individual is honored, but they also play a vital role in the overall framework.. Corporate learners should respect and honor the ideas of their peers. Every voice must carry weight, and there is always room for innovation.
2. "Lifelong Learning" Mindset (Personal Mastery)
Corporate learners must develop a lifelong learning perspective, wherein they value and understand the importance of continual growth. The focus is on practical skills and knowledge they can apply in real-world environments. For example, soft skills that allow employees to improve customer service tasks. Individuals must also display commitment and dedication to personal goals, as well as company-wide learning objectives.
3. Room For Innovation (Mental Models)
This trait of learning organizations is actually two-fold. First, corporate learners must be able to evaluate and assess their current cognitions through self-reflection. This allows them to challenge limiting beliefs that are standing in the way of progress. Every individual is then able to see how they fit into the big picture, and how they can serve the "greater good". Secondly, corporate learners must be encouraged to test out new theories and approaches. Risk is all part of the equation, as it allows people to learn from their mistakes and continually improve.
Shared vision. The development of a shared vision is important in motivating the staff to learn, as it creates a common identity that provides focus and energy for learning. The most successful visions build on the individual visions of the employees at all levels of the organization, thus the creation of a shared vision can be hindered by traditional structures where the company vision is imposed from above. Therefore, learning organizations tend to have flat, decentralized organizational structures. The shared vision is often to succeed against a competitor; however, Senge states that these are transitory goals and suggests that there should also be long-term goals that are intrinsic within the company.
Team learning. The accumulation of individual learning constitutes Team learning. The benefit of team or shared learning is that staff grow more quickly and the problem solving capacity of the organization is improved through better access to knowledge and expertise. Learning organizations have structures that facilitate team learning with features such as boundary crossing and openness. Team learning requires individuals to engage in dialogue and discussion; therefore team members must develop open communication, shared meaning, and shared understanding. Learning organizations typically have excellent knowledge management structures, allowing creation, acquisition, dissemination, and implementation of this knowledge in the organization.
Benefits
The main benefits are;
• Maintaining levels of innovation and remaining competitive
• Being better placed to respond to external pressures[
• Having the knowledge to better link resources to customer needs
• Improving quality of outputs at all levels
• Improving Corporate image by becoming more people oriented
• Increasing the pace of change within the organization
Barriers
Even within or without learning organization, problems can stall the process of learning or cause it to regress. Most of them arise from an organization not fully embracing all the necessary facets. Once these problems can be identified, work can begin on improving them.
Some organizations find it hard to embrace personal mastery because as a concept it is intangible and the benefits cannot be quantified; personal mastery can even be seen as a threat to the organization. This threat can be real, as Senge points out, that ?to empower people in an unaligned organization can be counterproductive?. In other words, if individuals do not engage with a shared vision, personal mastery could be used to advance their own personal visions. In some organizations a lack of a learning culture can be a barrier to learning. An environment must be created where individuals can share learning without it being devalued and ignored, so more people can benefit from their knowledge and the individuals be-comes empowered. A learning organization needs to fully accept the removal of traditional hierarchical structures.
Resistance to learning can occur within a learning organization if there is not sufficient buy-in at an individual level. This is often encountered with people who feel threatened by change or believe that they have the most to lose. They are likely to have closed mind sets, and are not willing to engage with mental models. Unless implemented coherently across the organization, learning can be viewed as elitist and restricted to senior levels. In that case, learning will not be viewed as a shared vision. If training and development is compulsory, it can be viewed as a form of control, rather than as personal development. Learning and the pursuit of personal mastery needs to be an individual choice, therefore enforced take-up will not work.
In addition, organizational size may become the barrier to internal knowledge sharing. When the number of employees exceeds 150, internal knowledge sharing dramatically decreases because of higher complexity in the formal organizational structure, weaker inter-employee relationships, lower trust, reduced connective efficacy, and less effective communication. As such, as the size of an organizational unit in-creases, the effectiveness of internal knowledge flows dramatically diminishes and the degree of intra-organizational knowledge sharing decreases.
Some problems and issues. In our discussion of Senge and the learning organization we point to some particular problems associated with his conceptualization. These include a failure to fully appreciate and incorporate the imperatives that animate modern organizations; the relative sophistication of the thinking he requires of managers (and whether many in practice are up to it); and questions regarding his treatment of organizational politics. It is certainly difficult to find real-life examples of learning organizations (Kerka 1995). There has also been a lack of critical analysis of the theoretical framework.
Based on their study of attempts to reform the Swiss Postal Service, Matthias Finger and Silvia Burgin Brand (1999) provide us with a useful listing of more important shortcomings of the learning organization concept. They conclude that it is not possible to transform a bureaucratic organization by learning initiatives alone. They believe that by referring to the notion of the learning organization it was possible to make change less threatening and more acceptable to participants. However, individual and collective learning, which has undoubtedly taken place, has not really been connected to organizational change and transformation‘. Part of the issue, they suggest, has to do with the concept of the learning organization itself. They argue that the concept of the learning organization:
1. Focuses mainly on the cultural dimension and does not adequately take into account the other dimensions of an organization. To transform an organization, it is necessary to attend to structures and the organization of work as well as the culture and processes. Focusing exclusively on training activities in order to foster learning… favours this purely cultural bias‘.
2. Favours individual and collective learning processes at all levels of the organization, but does not connect them properly to the organization’s strategic objectives. Popular models of organizational learning (such as Dixon 1994) assume such a link. It is, therefore, imperative that the link between individual and collective learning and the organization‘s strategic objectives is made‘. This shortcoming, Finger and Brand argue, makes a case for some form of measurement of organizational learning – so that it is possible to assess the extent to which such learning contributes or not towards strategic objectives.
Titany answered the question on October 26, 2021 at 06:39