Learning Organization
The article ‘What are learning organizations, and what do they really do?’ is essential for the topic because it provides more insight into what learning is in an organizational setting involving in the corporate business sector.
The article ‘Journal of organizational change management’ is crucial to providing more insight into an organizational system of thinking to support the continuous learning process in any business setting. More so, the scholarly work shows the critical factor of a learning organization that ensures the successful integration of any valuable knowledge.
The article ‘Management research review’ explains the relationship between a learning organization and organizational performance. In most cases, the learning process in any organization is aimed at improving the productivity of its employees, which eventually leads to better corporate performance.
Learning organization refers to the collective accumulation of knowledge for a group of people at an organizational level through integrating, cooperating, intuiting, interpreting, and institutionalizing. Primarily, the terms learning organization and organizational learning are used interchangeably to mean the process of acquiring knowledge in any social setting for a common goal. For example, most prominent companies and businesses such as General Electric, Microsoft, and Toyota are becoming learning organizations by focussing on the valuable knowledge and information they obtain daily from stakeholders, customers, employees, competitors, and business associates (Lobster, 2010). Necessarily, people in organizations are exposed to a wide variety of knowledge and learning opportunities. Still, it requires an excellent organizational structure and leadership system to keep track of the learning process.
Most importantly, the purpose of a learning organization is designed and sustained by inspired leadership. Learning organizations depends on the collection of information and knowledge from all the parties involved to improve their performance (Lobster, 2010). Mostly, the value of the continuous learning process in organizations is modeled, espoused, and driven by senior management and CEOs. The most important way an organization can learn is through the collection of valuable information from its employees, customers, and competitors. The learning process entails systematic documentation of vital data that can be analyzed and shared between team members to create knowledge. An organization’s management is responsible for mentoring and coaching employees to support the missions of learning in an organization.
The process of continuous learning is encoded into the DNA of most organizations to guarantee the sustainability and profitability of their business. Learning organizations can maintain a superior competitive edge against its rivals. Mostly, learning organization has unmatched brand equity against their competitors, and they can attract and retain the best talent in their industry. More so, a learning organization shows a high level of autonomy and homogeneity of performance.
However, being a learning organization is not easy because it requires a lot of dedication and work, which takes energy, time, and resources. Many organizations are thwarted in their attempt to be a learning organization by lack of support from the top management, inability to make the necessary follow-ups, heavy workloads, and unwillingness to commit to the idea of continuous learning. Most importantly, business dynamics may clash with the learning process of an organization. For example, employees in an organization may find it hard to learn or cope with newer technologies, which may lead to high turnover rates. Additionally, the learning process may prove disadvantageous in the long run if it is not carefully implemented to harness the best out of a worker, and an organization may end up unnecessarily laying off good employees.