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Why learning organization?
The notion of the
‘learning organization’ has gained popularity in recently
years as a response to an increasingly turbulent and
competitive environment. The realization for some that
competitive advantage comes increasingly from the contribution
of people working in the business has forced learning to the
top of the agenda for many corporations and the notion of a
‘leaning organization’ has evolved. There is a common
agreement of utilizing not just physical abilities of
employees but also their mental powers are crucial. People are
organization’s greatest resource and they are also the source
of any longer-term competitive advantage. Failure to give
quick response to the market leads to organizational
stagnation and ultimately organizational death.
Pedler et al.’s stated 11 characters of a leaning
organization, such as ‘a learning approach to strategy,
internal exchange of ideas and knowledge, self-development
opportunities for all, etc.’, which influent both internal and
external environments of an organization. Employees are the
repositories of the organization’s knowledge and wisdom. As
Tom Watson, former president of IBM, states: ‘If you burnt
down all our plants and we just kept our people and our files,
we would soon be as strong as ever.’ This underlines the
importance of HRM and HRD departments. Knowledge is seen as
power but a culture of openness is not easy to achieve.
Knowledge management has serious implications for
communication structures, employee involvement systems, reward
systems and training systems. Although organizations
acknowledge the importance of creating, managing and
transferring knowledge, there is a long way to go to translate
it into organizational strategies. Studies showed that the
biggest obstacles to create a knowledge-based organization
were the existing company culture, lack of ownership of a
problem, lack of senior management commitment, inappropriate
organizational structure, etc.
There are some reasons which made the organization fail to be
a learning organization, such as poor feedback, limited
encouragement, failure to understand the linkages between the
learning organization and HRM strategy, fail to deal with
feelings of uncertainty and insecurity in employees during
periods of intense competition and culture change, etc.
Considering factors which have been introduced above, there are
some suggestions to recommend as following:
Creating an environment of openness and trust,
Generating an atmosphere of certainty and security,
Developing strategy from the bottom up, through building a
shared vision, team building, and developing core competences
that are recognized and valued by all,
Have objectives that are clearly and positively liked to HRM
strategy,
Recognizing the measurement of learning can feed more
positively into an evaluation of the effectiveness of learning
process,
Creating a learning atmosphere that all members of the
organization share.
‘Organizational Culture’ had served to ‘transform compliance into
cooperation, consent into commitment, discipline into
self-discipline, the goals of the organization into the goals
of the employee’. The metaphor of ‘Learning Organization’
could well suffer the same fate, translated into an instrument
for control so that ambiguities of organizational life,
potentially fruitful for learning and creativity, are
suppressed in favor of a dominant and stable set of beliefs
and interests. Creating a learning organization is not an easy
thing to do. It takes considerable time to get the right
attitudes and conditions in the changing process.
Organizations aware of this point will benefit not only their
skills and but also competitive advantages. This is the key to
survive in the increasingly competitive global environment.
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