Leading Learning Organizations - Essay Example

Framework Essay Student’s Name Professor Course Date Framework Essay A learning organisation refers to a strategic commitment to capture and share learning in an organisation for the benefits of the organisation, teams, and individuals. Pedler, Burgoyne and Boydell (1991) defined “a learning organisation as an organisation, which facilitates the learning of every employee and consciously transform itself and its context.” Senge (1990) defined “a learning organisation as an organisation where people endlessly develop their capability to produce the outcomes, which they really want, where novel, extensive thinking patters are cultivated, where group targets are released, and where the individuals are continuously learning how to learn jointly.” From these definitions, it is evident that a learning organisation arises from organisational alignment as well as the joint ability to sense and understand a changing environment; to put in new knowledge through continuous change and learning: to imbed this knowledge in the practices and systems and to transform the knowledge into outputs. Such learning can be taken as complete behaviour oriented to attain capabilities for handling the needs as well as the challenges of an organisation in a competitive environment. Learning organisation facilitates a continuous cycle of generating information, of integrating it into the organisational context, of jointly interpreting it and of taking action based on it. For a learning organisation, a learning culture as well as a learning structure has to be developed and work should be organised in a manner, which favours learning (Flood, 2009). The capacity to become a learning organisation is constituted by collective and individual capacities to learn, however it has to include the organisational dimensions. As a result, six aspects of the learning capacity of an organisation can be deduced: the individual learning capacity, the group learning capacity, the organisational learning capacity, structural learning capacity, and leadership learning capacity. Dimensions Whole learning cycle Generation Step Integration Step Interpretation Step Action Step Individual Learning capacity System thinking Ability to assimilate new information Ability to enter into contact with environment Self observation attention Multi-skilling Openness Ability to integrate new information Creativity ability to think Tolerance Empathy Courage Humour Capacity to transfer Ability to take responsibility Enthusiasm Openness to change Team Learning capacity Team capacity Monitoring feedback loops Self-correction experimenting Multi-functions Helpfulness Capacity to dialogue Diversity Capacity to face conflicts Capacity to implement Structure Decentralization Flat hierarchies Integrate staff into line Small organizational units Frequent interactions Leadership Give responsibility for generating information Reward for pertinent information Egalitarian conditions Coaching Cultural Problem solving Concern for measurement Active attitude towards information Openness towards the outside Transparency Trust Culture of continuous information Culture of communication and dialogue Openness to numerous perspectives Spirit of competition and comparison Individual learning capacity is the first important factor in learning organisation. Capturing individual learning is the first step of making it practical to an organisation. The most common aspect of a learning organisation is the attempt to set individual learning in a framework, which values learning and endeavours to learn other lessons and add extra value to the learning, which occurs. The importance of individual learning is multiplied and maximized by systems, which enable the organisation to learn from the learning process and to collect the learning for the others, benefits. Individuals’ capacity to learn enables them to add to their own skill level; they raise their status in the organisation and offer organisational resource. Learning organisations nurture the new and expansive thinking patterns by individuals. The main justification for a learning organisation is that in circumstance of rapid change, only the adaptive, flexible and productive organisations do extremely well. For this to take place, organisations have to discover the way they can tap the commitment of the people as well as their capacity to learn at every level. According to the learning organisation approach, firms, which learn faster than the rest, have an advantage in the market over the competitors. A learning organisation attempts to institutionalise continuous learning and hence they promote the individual capacity to learn. This implies that information and knowledge is shared between the employees and teams. The structure of the organization facilitates the transfer and sharing of information as quickly and broadly as possible. The generation step in individual learning is thus the ability to take in new information, ability to cope with the changing environment as well as self-observation attention. The integration-learning step requires the individual openness, multi-skilling, and the capacity to take in new information. The individuals must possess creative capacity to think, courage, tolerance, and empathy. The action step in the learning organisation when it comes to individual learning is the capacity to transfer information and knowledge, openness to change and capacity to be responsible. One of the five important aspects discussed by Senge under learning organisation was personal mastery (personal or individual learning and growth); this means that individual capacity to learn is quite important. Team learning is also one of the aspects which Senge et al. (1999) identified as a component of learning organisation. Senge (1990) laid emphasis on group learning activities as opposed to team process developments. For team learning to take place, individual learning has to take place. Organisational learning occurs with the help of individual learning. According to Senge (1996), the individual is only the real learning entity and for a team to learn, individual learning has to come true, and for organisation consisting of teams to learn, the team learning has to take place. In a learning organisation, team learning has to reflect the collaborative skills and the spirit of collaboration that undergird teams’ effective use. For team learning capacity to occur, there has to be capacity to dialogue, capacity to face conflicts and dialogue among the individuals. A learning organisation also necessitates a flexible structure. It is viewed as one with the ability to integrate structures and people toward continuous change and learning. Although people instigate change individually because of learning, organisations have to create facilitative structures for supporting and capturing learning to move towards their goals (Senge 1999). The structure should be based on careful needs evaluations as well as involvement of top leadership to increase employee engagement. As the management struggle towards the learning organisation, they engage in activities for changing the structural organisational dimensions. In more adaptive organisational structures, there is a greater emphasis on equality, openness, change, and continuous improvement. People are encouraged to become aware of the entire system, the way all things fit together with each other and with the environment. Structures work in such a manner that work tasks are utilized as chances for uninterrupted learning. Leadership is also an important aspect in learning organisations. Learning leaders are usually involved in an organisation with the leaders’ side-by side to comprehend the business strategy, goals, skills, objectives, skills requirement, and the way learning can play a part in improving business solutions. They meet with the senior official, assist them identify priorities and provide them business opportunities, which provides the most business impact. Learning leaders build a business environment, which is conducive in various ways such as articulating guiding ideas, building operating environment for learning through conscious effort to the learning infrastructure, and building operating environments for learning to occur (Easterby-Smith et al.1999). Culture is also an important aspect in learning organisation. There has to be an organisational climate, which nurtures learning. The organisational culture has to have the capacity to adapt to external environment; it has to improve its capacity to adapt/change continuously; it has to develop individual as well as collective learning and has to use the learning results to attain better results (Ortenblad 2004). The culture of communication and dialogues as well as individual openness to numerous perspectives and spirit of competition and comparison also has to be in place (Tsang 1997). The culture should also promote mechanisms, systems, as well as processes, which continually improve people capacities to attain sustainable objectives. All these dimensions are evident in the numerous approaches used to define construct learning. These numerous approaches are learning perspective, systems thinking, integrative perspective, and strategic perspective. According to Senge (1990), learning organisations have an adaptive ability and the capacity to create alternative futures. Systems thinking are the capacity to see interrelationships as opposed to linear cause-effect chains. A learning organisation has to have team learning, shared visions, system thinking, personal mastery, and mental models. The learning perspective recognises eleven areas through which learning organisation occurs: “participative policymaking, learning approach to strategy, internal exchange, enabling structure, information, intercompany learning, learning culture, all individuals self development, formative accounting and control, reward flexibility, boundary workers as environmental scanners” (Cross & Israelit 2000). According to strategic perspective, learning organisations require a comprehension of the strategic internal drivers needed for building the learning capacity (Ortenblad 2004). According to the integrative approach, a learning organisation consists of two constituents-individuals and structure which are interactive aspects of organisation development and change. The individual learning capacity, team-learning capacity, learning leadership, and adaptive structure and adaptive culture are the identifying attributes of a learning organisation. A learning organisation understands the potential and capacity of its individuals and teams and attempts to release the potential. The leadership also understands that it has to respond and adapt to change by changing its structure in line with the present conditions to beat competition (Isabel & Elena 2003). The framework above comprising of all these aspects can be used to make judgments’ about the performance and capacities of a learning organization, as they are the main attributes of such an organization. Any genuine effort towards the direction identified in the framework is certainly beneficial to organisations, as they become learning organisations. The four-stage process adopted are the dimensions of an organizational learning capacity and its characteristics. Individual learning capacity, team learning capacity, structure, leadership and cultural are the various dimension of a learning organization whereas the whole learning cycle, generation step, integration step, interpretation step and action step show the various activities under the different dimensions. This is a pragmatic approach to learning organization and is well suited to include the various stakeholder into the learning process of an organization. The threefold structure/leadership/culture division of the organization is important as it is well suited to include the various stakeholder into the learning process of an organization.In developing a learning organization, one has to develop a learning structure and learning culture, and also work should be organized in a manner which favors learning and hence it is important to conceptualize the framework of a learning framework using a pragmatic approach. The organizational learning capacity is constituted by the individual and collective capacity to learn. The dimensions used represent the learning capacity, which makes up for an organization capacity to learn in a continuous way. The learning styles used in the framework are used to show a whole learning cycle. The cycle enables movement from each step to the next . Collecting does not take place unless all the members are able to jointly work together and choose actions based on joint sense making and then are able to look at the result of the actions to that they can improve. The framework supports organizational learning cycle. It is a whole learning cycle as it cover numerous approaches such as learning perspective, systems thinking, integrative perspective, and strategic perspective. The approach to learning organization taken in this case is more pragmatic in much as it examine practices and link then to an overall model of the learning organizational. There are enablers such as leadership, an environment-supportive culture and learning climate, learning-individual learning, teamwork learning and organizational learning which lastly creates value. Reference List Cross, R & Israelit, S 2000, Strategic learning in the knowledge economy, Butterworth Heinemann, Boston. Easterby-Smith, M., Araujo, L & Burgoyne, J 1999, Organizational Learning and the Learning Organization: Developments in theory and practice, Sage Publications, London Flood, R 2009, Rethinking the Fifth Discipline: Learning within the Unknowable, Routledge, London. Isabel, P & Elena, R 2003, How learning capacity influences on organizational performance: an empirical evidence, 5th International Conference. Viewed August 15 2012, http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/wbs/conf/olkc/archive/olk5/papers/paper46.pdf Ortenblad, A 2004, The learning organization: towards an integrated model, The Learning Organization, vol. 11, pp. 129-144. Pedler, M, Burgoyne, J & Boydell, T 1991, The learning company, McGraw-Hill, New York Senge, P 1990, The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization, Doubleday Century, New York. Senge, P 1996, Leading learning organizations, Training & Development, vol. 50, no. 12, pp. 36-40.  Senge, P. et al 1999, The dance of change: the challenge of sustaining momentum in learning organizations, Doubleday, New York. Tsang, E 1997, Organisational learning and the learning organization: a dichotomy between descriptive and prescriptive research, Human Relations, vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 73-89. Read More