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Organizational Learning and Learning Organization

The modern business market is challenging for all the participants, and the companies have to adapt rapidly on the dynamic changes, in order to succeeded and survive. Constant innovations, new technologies, competitors and other factors force the companies to continuously learn and develop, and to increase their efficiency and effective on every level.

 Organizational learning can be defined as a continuously process of creating and improving the organizational capability to change.


The advantage of organizational learning is the fact that this type of learning stays within the organization always, no matter the employees’ fluctuations and changes of their structure or number.

What is The Learning Organization?

 Learning organization is not a specific model of organizational structure, but the characteristic of the organization as a system. The concept of Organizational Learning was developed in the previous century, during late 60s and early 70s, with the goal to explain the new trends present in the organizations that time. This concept is the base of The Learning Organization concept, which is still very important and present.

 The Learning Organization concept is related with organizational performances, and presents learning as a crucial component of every organization success and survival. Introducing the radical changes in managers and other employees’ behavior is the essence of the concept, in order to change the low performance organizations into the high performance organizations. Each learning organization has to create and develop the following components, and direct them to work together in order to support the organizational learning.

To understand better the concept of organizational learning, the parallel of this type of learning can be made with individual learning (Greenberg, Baron,1998):

Individual learning:

Organizational learning

 

Continuous process of individual’s behavior changing as a result of previous and new experiences

Continuous process of changes through the innovations and improvements of the process of production, services, customer support and other sectors, gained as a result of experiences and knowledge.

There are many definitions of the Learning Organization term, but the common descriptions for all the learning organizations are:

ü They are adapting to the external surrounding.

ü They are constantly improving the capabilities for change

ü They are developing and supporting both individual and collective learning

ü They are actively using the learning outcomes to improve the overall goals and results.

Five Learning disciplines

 Every organization is a learning system in some way, but the difference between different organizations are the learning methods. Therefore, each organization/company is adapting to the changes differently and has its own path of development. What they have in common in this process is the start point: past experience, both past and current practices, and estimated abilities for a change.

Peter Senge build and developed the model of learning disciplines, defining the five crucial types of learning, each organization should develop. These five learning disciplines are the essence of the organization’s life learning process and the core of the above-mentioned concept of a Learning Organization.

 System Thinking

The point is to observe the organization as a unique system, build from many different elements, which can not function separately. Therefore, the organization has to learn equally on all the levels, in order to grow and develop.  Senge compared organization/company with a living organism, precisely with an elephant: if you split the elephant into two pieces, you will not get two new elephants that you can grow and rise. It is the same with your company.

Personal Mastery

This discipline is focused on continuous growth and development of the personal vision, strength, energy, patient, and objectivity. Individuals have to start from setting up their own goals and visions and to be able to see current reality as it is.

Mental Models 

People are more likely to make decisions and to develop certain opinions based on their presumptions and generalizations. Each individual has its own habits, behavior patterns, and values, defined as a mental model. To make them compiled with company’s vision and goals, people have to start from their own behavior.

Shared vision

Employees have their own vision of the future. The role of the organization is to build a unique vision, acceptable for all the employees.  If every employee accepts the company’s vision as its own, the goals will be more likely to achieve.

Team learning

Last but not least, Team learning has the fundamental importance for every organization, since the organization is composed of many teams. If the team, an entity, is not learning, the organization is not going to be able to do the same.

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