Monday, December 16, 2019

Learning Organization


Learning organization is an organization that helps the learning of its employee and regularly changes itself. These organizations allows them to persist or succeed competitive advantages in the business environment (Farrukh and Waheed, 2015). Learning organization is an outcome of enabling holistic learning at all level of the organization, it’s impossible to construct learning organization by providing employee trainings only. It is something beyond the training of the individuals (Pedlar et al., 1991).  Learning organizations itself have collectivism and shared values of themselves (Watkins & Marsick, 1993). As Bratianu (2015) the classic example for learning organization would be an orchestra performing a symphony. No musician able to play the symphony by himself, each member of the orchestra learns the individual part of the symphony. Then whole orchestra can play by integrating each part of the individual. Such a way organizations need individuals learn and integration of them for overall success in business. Such organizations are identified as learning organization.

Toyota Kata of Organizational Learning
Toyota’s process of continuous improvement is a great demonstration of organization learning. They introduced it as “Toyota Kata” which means way of designing and implementing a successful management based on the concept of continuous improvement (Bratianu, 2015). According to Rother (2010), Toyota has exploration and experimentation operation process which can be expressed by the well-known Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle. The four stages of this process are as follow:

·         Plan. Define what you intend to do, based on the previous experience. Define your target condition and you’re working hypotheses.
·         Do. Try to implement your plan and test your hypotheses.
·         Check. Compare your outcome with the expected one.
·         Act. Standardize and stabilize what works, or begin the PDCA cycle again. 

Toyota added the words “Go and See” for above cycle, since it is important to identify the actual condition at all stages of the PDCA. If an error occur in the operations, Toyota’s culture isn’t penalizing their employee. Instead it become as an essential point for organizational learning and continuous improvement. Hence, employee always try to do their best and when a problem generate they identify it as a failure of the systems (Bratianu, 2015). Its shows that Toyota provisions the concept of continuous improvement or evolutionary learning can be applied to any kind of problem. So, Toyota PDCA process prove that learning organization culture is be benefitted to business strategic achievements (Starbuck & Hedberg, 2003). 


As author emphasized learning organizations are provided main six benefits to the organization to gain competitive advantage in terms of organizational human resources. The first is “An open culture” that’s allow share information, admit mistakes and learn through mistakes. Since the constructive criticism is encouraged, once a problem arises they mainly focused on find the root cause to find permanent solution. Next is “Feedback loops”. Here employees are assessed in 360 degrees approach, hence they can optimally find out their good and bad. “Personal mastery” is the next feature. Always employees are encouraged to masters in their profession as well any area where they interest and capable. This make employees into experts who are working with motivation. Also these organizations are planned for “Intelligence fast failures”. Rather wasting time for planning these organizations are implementing products in proto type to get feedbacks from test user groups. The goal is fail fast and acquire the necessary changes to bring success product to the market soon. Learning organizations are follow “best practices” do by other companies and use them for the betterment for the company. Finally, learning organizations are cultivated “common vision”. All employees in the company precisely aware where they want to go and how they should go. Since goals are clear, everyone knows their contribution to the organization. Hence, regulations, authority, and corruption can be reduced. In order to achieve all these, companies need to integrate above features to the company’s business operation appropriately. 

List of References 

Bratianu, C. (2015). Organizational Knowledge Dynamics: Managing Knowledge Creation, Acquisition, Sharing, and Transformation. Hershey: IGI Global. 
Farrukh, M. and Waheed, A. (2015) Learning Organization and Competitive Advantage-An Integrated Approach, Journal of Asian Business Strategy. 5(4), pp. 73-79
Pedlar, M., Burgoyne, J., and Boydell, T.  (1991) The learning company: A strategy for sustainable development. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill.
Rother, M. (2010) Toyota kata. Managing people for improvement, adaptiveness, and superior results. New York, NY: McGraw Hill.
Sprouts (2017) The Learning Organization: Characteristics of a Modern Enterprise [online]. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40meQNZl3KU.>. [Accessed on 15 December 2019].
Starbuck, W.H. and Hedberg, B. (2003) How organizations learn from success and failure. In M. Dierkes, A. Berthoin Antal, J. Child & I. Nonaka (Eds.). Handbook of organizational learning & knowledge. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Watkins, K., and Marsick, V. (1993) Sculpting the learning organization: Lessons in the art and science of systemic change. California, Jossey-Bass publishers.

3 comments:

  1. According to the Learning and development methodologies and practices, as depicted in this part, mean to guarantee that individuals in the business obtain and build up the learning, aptitudes and skills they have to do their work viably and improve their professions to their own advantage and that of the association (Armstrong and Taylor, 2014).
    Training and development is characterized as a procedure of deliberately creating business related information and skills in individuals to boost capabilities (Swanson & Holton, 2001). Training is the way toward giving workers particular aptitudes or helping them rectify weaknesses in their tasks capabilities and development is an attempt to furnish workers with the capacities the company will require in future (Gomez-Mejia, Balkin & Cardy, 2001)Training and development are arranged learning encounters that show employees how to achieve their present or prospective professions successfully (Kleiman, 2000).Therefore based on the above learning and development is vital in any organisation as basically what it provides is to enhance a workers knowledge, skills and attitudes that will pave way for them to succeed in the organisation at present as well as develop them in future jobs as well.

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    1. While agree with your contribution in the comment, I would like to elaborate way how the organization could use to assess productivity and effectiveness of training and development activities provide to employees.
      Since skills gap looms the productivity and competitiveness both in organizational and operational levels, closing the skills gap is vitally important in continuously penetrate the market (Tahir et al, 2014). Therefore, Basic purpose of providing training and development is to support attainment of organizational goal. Apart from that, it provides prospect prepare employees for possible future jobs (Sims, 2002). However, without evaluate outcome of training and development, it is impossible to understand effectiveness of the programme to organizational development. Thus, evaluation of training and development is the most essential aspect of training programme. Hence, all decent training and development programmes start with identification of training and development needs and ends with evaluation (Gopal, 2009).
      There are many different models are available to evaluate effectiveness of trainings and following methods are some of recommended methods to validate training and development (Iyer, 2009).
      • Kirkpatrick Model
      • CIPP Evaluation model
      • CIRO approach
      • Phillip’s Evaluation approach
      Since, not all models are suitable with every training and development programme; organizations are responsible to choose the most appropriate one as per the nature of training activity and objective. Hence, that evaluation of training and development would be ensured the effectiveness of programme and their contribution to organizations (Topno, 2012).

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  2. Training and Development basically deals with the acquisition of understanding, knowhow, techniques and practices. In fact, training and development is one of the imperatives of human resource management as it can improve performance at individual, collegial and organizational levels. As the process of ‘increasing one’s capacity to take action, organizations are now increasingly becoming particular with organizational learning and therefore collective development. Organizational learning, on the other hand, refers to the “efficient procedure to process, interpret and respond to both internal and external information of a predominantly explicit nature (Tahir et al., 2014). The emergence of the concept of organizational learning is central on the hitherto idea that prior advocacies of learning are tended to its commercial significance and are lacking of empirical information on learning processes (Easterby-Smith, 1999, cited in Tahir et al., 2014). Training focuses on present jobs while development prepares employees for possible future jobs. Basically, the objective of training and development is to contribute to the organization's overall goal (Sims, 2002, cited in Tahir et al., 2014).

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