Organizational Learning

Performing a strong intelligence grants an organization a guarantee of long-term success. This paper investigates the enhancing effect of organizational learning capabilities on competitive intelligence at the commercial banks in Jordan. A sample within top and middle managements was used. Measurement instrument validity and model fit were assessed before testing hypotheses. This study emphasizes the role learning capability plays in enhancing intelligence. Key findings support importance of organizational context of learning facilitators within Jordanian banks and recommend banks to practice learning capabilities in order to introduce themselves as intelligent organizations.

In this paper, concept mapping is suggested as a methodological catalyst for organizational learning. Concept mapping, by virtue of its psychological and sociological foundations, offers a way to simultaneously understand complex systems in terms of both intra- and inter-personal relationships. We posit that key stakeholders, when taken together, represent the organization as a bounded unit and set the stage for

"Since its very inception, social work has been considered an organizationally based profession, with the majority of its workforce employed within formal organizations. Whether in nonprofit, for-profit, or governmental agencies, the practical realities of human service organizations are a central element of professional social work. This book explores the climate and culture of these agencies and provides essential information for surviving and thriving in this setting. It prepares students for their future careers so that they will feel empowered in their work and be able to fulfill their responsibilities toward organizational, community, and social change. Using real-life examples, the authors examine the internal structures of management, financing, and supervision and discuss common conflicts between agencies and professionals. The book’s straightforward tone and practical advice make it an asset to anyone entering human service organizations.

This new edition contains updated examples, case studies, and references. It also contains valuable information on the effects of the recent financial crisis on human service organizations. Agencies now face increased caseloads and more complex social problems with fewer resources and less money. Understanding how these events have changed the nature of human service organizations will allow students to be better prepared for the work ahead of them.

Features

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Expanded content on the practical aspects of organizational theory and suggestions for developing leadership skills
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Updated examples, case studies, and references throughout the book
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Key points and discussion questions following each chapter
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Updated instructor’s manual available online as a PDF or Word document"

ABSTRACT
Objectives of the Study
The objective of this mixed methods case study is two-fold. First, it explores corporate learning using the theory of organizational knowledge creation and one US based corporation to determine the theory’s relevance to American firms. Second, it seeks to understand how social practices and leadership behaviors affect employee knowledge or “true beliefs” and thus the implications to the firm’s knowledge creation and ultimately, its competitive advantage. Ikujiro Nonaka’s theory of organizational knowledge creation is used as the framework to examine the extent to which internal factors affect knowledge creation at the organizational and employee levels. The research addresses two questions regarding Nonaka’s theory: 1) it assesses the theory in a US corporation with a relatively homogenous population to determine the validity of the theory that was developed outside the US and 2) it examines to what extent internal factors such as social practices and leadership behaviors affect the organizational knowledge creation process. In addition, consequences from events external to the firm are assessed to determine their impact on knowledge creation and corporate learning.
Summary
The study used knowledge creation theory to understand how internal behaviors and external events affected corporate learning and competitive advantage. Given that knowledge is only useful in its context, the introduction described the origins of the firm and impact of the Internet. The literature review provided the historical context for organizational culture in US firms, the growth of learning organizations and it summarized organizational knowledge creation theory. Social practices and leadership behaviors were explored in relation to a variety of topics. The research used quantitative and qualitative data that included survey data and qualitative data collected from semi-structured interviews, direct observation, internal documents, and secondary sources. The variety of sources aided the attempt to identify robust answers to the broad research questions raised in the study.
Conclusions
The interviews and direct observations at the firm reveal that organizational knowledge creation is not evident in this US corporation, primarily due to the narrow way in which knowledge is perceived and leadership behaviors that fail to consistently empower subordinates in the hierarchical management model. The cultural beliefs that preclude knowledge creation were also observed to thwart corporate learning. Several social practices and leadership behaviors appear to influence employee beliefs and thus corporate learning including communication transparency, decision-making and accountability, and strategic responses to external “random” events in digital communication. Shortcomings in these areas appear to have related and unintended consequences of diminished trust, lack of confidence, and risk aversion that can jeopardize the firm’s competitive advantage.

This article discusses the role of practices and people's participation in practices in conceptual accounts of organizing, learning, and organizational learning. Specifically, the discussion takes its point of departure in Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger's account of learning as legitimate peripheral participation in practices, and Theodore Schatzki's practice theory account of organizing and organizations. Both accounts center on the role of practices as people come to know, and as changes occur in social activity and organizational settings. However, the two accounts are based on different ontologies. Borrowing the terminology of John Dewey and Arthur Bentley, Lave and Wenger instantiate a substantivist, and ultimately individualist, ontology, whereas Schatzki's event ontology is relational. It is argued that both ontologies have merits of their own, but the article seeks to integrate the two approaches by utilizing Ole Dreier's notion of the life trajectories of persons across social practices. In this perspective, organizational learning shows when people's life trajectories are affected by the bundles of social practices they engage with, and when the bundles of social practices are transformed by the way people enact the practices.

In the transition from an industrial to a knowledge society, and in order to response to the dynamic and changing environment, an intelligent complex adaptive system is required to design a knowledge organization. The system which knowledge, learning, and intelligence are three characteristics of it. To fulfill this, the concepts of knowledge management and organization intelligence have developed close to each other. This research has investigated the position of knowledge management in organizational intelligence, and the interplay between them. It can be concluded that preserving and enhancing the organizational intelligence needs organizing and addressing of knowledge management processes, so that organizational intelligence determine type and volume of knowledge required for active and purposeful application of knowledge in alignment with strategic vision to anticipate environment and adaptive behavior, and the experiences gained from the intelligent behavior will be reused to ...

With the exponential growth in ‘big data’ information volumes within the organization, the convergence of traditional business intelligence, enterprise search, social media, text analytics, knowledge organization and machine learning has the potential to revolutionize how we search for and discover information and knowledge.

However, it appears to have become almost unfashionable to mention ‘people’ in this paradigm. Yet these new techniques and information volumes are likely to place an even greater reliance on underlying information flows, social interactions and information literacy.

The findings from this research study lead to a suggestion that some practitioners and management might wish to consider moving away from ‘first generation’ Information Management (IM) and enterprise search & discovery capability viewpoints. These viewpoints have generally been dominated by reductionist (simple answers to complex issues), fragmented, technological and bureaucratic approaches.

A more enlightened ‘second generation’ viewpoint of IM and enterprise search & discovery capability, could be one in which socio-cognitive elements are fully embraced in a proactive ‘systems thinking’ approach; where the organization is the information system, a complex, changeable and unpredictable system. Thinking in this way may lead management and practitioners to change tack and pull different levers to improve IM and enterprise search & discovery capabilities.

The "learning organization" model is defined and five case studies in five federal agencies are closely examined where managers are engaged in focused, guided efforts to implement this model. Process factors are examined as the work continues with cross communication between these agencies and facilitators from the Society for Organizational Learning.

The first wave of Knowledge Management was mainly technology driven. The current second wave focuses on behaviour and culture with concepts such as Communities of Practice. This paper proposes an integrated socio-technical framework for knowledge sharing and learning. It argues that learning is a capability of both, the social and the technical subsystem within a given system. Each subsystem has to convey its learning to the other subsystem to improve overall system performance. The other subsystem in turn has ...

The purpose of this literature review is to analyze what organizational development (OD) experts have written about the three critical roles in a human resource (HR) based approach to an operational type Knowledge Management (KM) system. Those three roles are the role of employees, the role of HR, the role of top leadership and culture.
Keywords: knowledge management, human resources, leadership, and organizational culture

Abstract: This study sought to determine the relationship between four independent variables educational level, longevity, gender, type of enterprise, and the dependent variable respondents' perception of culture toward organizational learning readiness. An exploratory correlational research design was employed to survey 498 employees in seven small business enterprises in the southern and Midwestern United States. The results indicated a large portion of the variance in the dependent variable was explained by the ...

A case study for organizational behavior based on the "DownCity"episode of the fourth season of Kitchen Nightmares.

This document contains (1) a summary of the series (2) a list of the cast of characters (3) an episode recap and (4) two discussion questions suitable for classroom use in undergraduate courses such as organizational behavior and principles of management.

For solutions to the discussion questions, please email "starling.hunter@alumni.duke.edu" with the phrase "Solution request" in the subject line.

SHOW SUMMARY Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares is a television program featuring British celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay first broadcast on Channel 4 in 2004 in the UK. An American adaptation of this show entitled Kitchen Nightmares debuted September 19, 2007 on Fox. In each episode, Ramsay visits a failing restaurant and acts as a troubleshooter to help improve the establishment in just one week. Ramsay revisits the restaurant a few months later to see how business has fared in his absence.

The aim of benchmarking studies is to enable the relevant sector professionals to identify gaps in the performance of the organization. Thus, they can provide a more objective perspective for them to gain a competitive advantage. The aim of this study is to collect the criterion values of the Dimensions of the Learning Organization Questionnaire (DLOQ) in terms of being a learning organization for the model of Watkins & Marsick (1993) which was created to measure the performance of organizations. In this context, in the last decade, academic articles with the keyword “DLOQ” were scanned. Finally, 40 articles were used to calculate the total comparison score. As a result, benchmarking figures were obtained on a sectoral and regional basis and an evaluation was made on a sample application. It is seem that European and Asian organizations show the best performance in terms of their benchmark figures, while the worst in the Middle East. On the other hand, Electronics & IT is by far the best performing sector.

Sharing knowledge across projects is a necessary challenge to ensure the competitive advantage of organizations. With temporary structures, multiple roles, multiple activities, and limited time, the project-based organization needs to retain the knowledge gained in a project and share it with others. “Lessons learned” processes are implemented in order to systematize the transfer of this knowledge, with the main challenge being the mobilization of people to record their experiences in a database. The stored knowledge, however, needs to be validated before being shared and appropriately classified in one of the three main categories: Best Practices, Lessons Learned, and Points for Attention. This study shows the benefits of a checklist / action plan for ensuring the effectiveness of the validation stage, since failures during this stage may jeopardize the initial effort to mobilize project teams to record their experiences and learning.

Purpose – The dynamism of new economy requires information professionals not only to create knowledge quickly but also to acquire and apply knowledge through knowledge sharing (KS). So, determining factors that may influence knowledge sharing within an organization or among organizations has become an important area of research. This paper aims to review determinant factors influencing inter- and intra-organizational knowledge sharing in order to offer a framework. Design/methodology/approach – The present paper proceeds in three phases. In the first phase, the published literature on knowledge sharing has been reviewed extensively with consideration of their empirical applications. Next, based on the understanding gained from the previous stage, a conceptual framework of successful factors for effective inter-organizational knowledge sharing has been proposed. In the third phase, the proposed framework has been developed and finalized towards its maturity. Findings – Based on the l...

The existence of a learning curve in which a firm’s costs decline with cumulative experience suggests that early entry provides learning opportunities that create advantage by reducing future costs relative to later entrants. While prior strategy research often assumes that learning curves are deterministic and known ex ante to firms, a substantial body of evidence suggests that learning curves are inherently uncertain. If there is uncertainty in the learning curve, then the taken-for-granted wisdom regarding the strategic implications of learning curves may over- or under-emphasize the value of early entry. We consider two forms of uncertainty prospective (future costs) and contemporaneous (current costs). We demonstrate computationally that while prospective uncertainty in the learning curve enhances the benefits of early entry, contemporaneous uncertainty reduces these benefits. Further, we examine the implications of these findings for competition and learning curve spillovers between leader and laggard firms. Recognizing learning curve uncertainty highlights a novel form of spillovers that don’t affect expected cost, but rather affect uncertainty about cost. Our core insight is that when learning curve uncertainty is large relative to the expected learning rate, it is uncertainty, rather than expectations about this rate, that determines the extent of early mover advantage.

The aim of the present study is to identify the extent
to which commercial Islamic banks in Jordan pay
attention to knowledge management and to explore the
interest level with various knowledge resources in their
strategies. The other goal is to identify the part taken by
knowledge resource diversification strategy in the increase
of organizational learning levels among employees.
Participants were (220) employees selected with the
simple random method and recruited from the different
organizational levels at branch Islamic banks in Jordan
representing 20% of the whole population (N=1101). Data
collected using the questionnaires were analyzed to and
the following results were reached:
a. In general, the commercial Islamic banks employ
the diversification strategy management at high level
(M=3.93), and questionnaire areas were in the following
descendent order: organizational entities, human
resources, and artifacts made in the organization.
b. Results show that knowledge resource diversification
strategy management has a significant part at a high
level (M=4.34) in increasing the organizational learning
level among employees at the Jordanian Islamic banks
studied. Specifically, dimensions of knowledge resource
diversification strategy management were in descendant
order: artifacts made by the organization, organizational
entities, and human resources available at the organization.
c. There were no statistically significant differences
attributed to sex and experience regarding the role of
knowledge resource diversification strategy management;
whereas statistically significant differences attributed to
academic qualifications were found regarding the role of
knowledge resource diversification strategy management
excluding the knowledge resources related to artifacts
made by the organization.

It is well known that East Asian firms have utilized learning for their development. However, little is known about their learning mode and how it has evolved. Using theoretical explanation, we explain the initial stage of learning mode and how the latecomer’s learning has evolved as they acquire knowledge. We identify that at the initial stage, vicarious learning from external competitors is more influential, although both direct and indirect learning take place to overcome liability of newness. However, as they are grown, their dependency on vicarious learning from external competitor declines while search for vicarious learning from internal sources increases. Overall findings on latecomer’s learning and its learning sequence have important implication not only for research of latecomers but also for learning theories.

Nuclear power accidents repeatedly reveal that the industry has an incomplete understanding of the complex risks involved in its operation. Through analyzing the investigation of a nuclear power incident in Sweden in 2006, I show how the industry’s learning
practices shape recurrent normalization of risk regulation after such surprises. Learning is shaped through institutionalized measures of sufficiency and particular “risk objects” (e.g.
human factors and safety culture) created through learning from previous events. Subsequent regulatory measures are shaped through improvement scripts associated with these risk objects. These learning practices exclude alternative conceptual perspectives to understand and address safety-critical incidents. Latent risks will therefore produce similar events in the future. The article contributes to the literature on organizational learning, policy making, sensemaking and normalization in complex systems. To improve learning from incidents and regulation in high-hazard industries, social scientists and a wider circle of stakeholders should be included in the regulatory and post-incident
examination processes.

The total quality management (TQM) movement appears to be gaining more converts than management by objectives (MBO), quality circles or any of the management "practices " of yesteryear. Its appeal lies in the fact that it seems to offer a systematic approach to improving the strategic and operational performance of the organisation, an approach which appears attractive to accountants, marketers and production managers alike. Indeed, many enterprises are instituting organisation-wide TQM programmes which link the various functional disciplines in a unified effort to improve performance. When examining TQM, it is easy to see its wide appeal. Essentially, it embraces the core philosophies of good strategic management. Boyett and Conn[l] define it as "... a customer-focused, strategic and systematic

Organizations have been incorporated into their practice some principles of management that give shape to what we call organizational learning and that since long time ago, was under the concept of personal learning where different individuals from different backgrounds and, given the nature of its characteristics, were able to learn about, evaluate and incorporate new and varied practices, which brings as a consequence a change in the Organization and the manifestation of a new management scheme based in the knowledge. The objective of this analysis is to understand the influence of organizational learning in the members of the Organization and their participation as a change in the same tutor. It's an exploratory study that was based on the review of the literature concerning the topic; find the answer to the question. As a conclusion that was reached, establishing that organizational learning is aimed to bring about a change in people's behavior and models of management of organizations. As a result, organizations improve, extend their survival and people are upgraded, thus obtaining a greater personal and professional development.

Las organizaciones han ido incorporando a su práctica algunos principios de gestión que dan forma a lo que llamamos aprendizaje organizacional y que desde hace mucho tiempo, se percibía bajo el concepto del aprendizaje personal donde individuos diversos provenientes de distintos contextos y, dada la naturaleza de sus características, eran capaces de conocer, valorar e incorporar nuevas y variadas prácticas, lo que trae como consecuencia un cambio en la organización y la manifestación de un nuevo esquema de gestión basado en el conocimiento. El objetivo de este análisis es comprender la influencia del aprendizaje organizacional en los integrantes de la organización y su participación como tutor del cambio en la misma. Se trata de un estudio de carácter exploratorio ya que se basó en la revisión de la literatura referente al tema, encontrar la respuesta a la interrogante. La conclusión que se alcanzó, establece que el aprendizaje organizacional está orientado a provocar un cambio en el comportamiento de las personas y en los modelos de gestión de las organizaciones. Gracias a ello, las organizaciones mejoran, amplían su supervivencia y las personas se actualizan, obteniendo así un mayor desarrollo personal y profesional.