Ongoing Journey of Learning Organizations

 Many reason organisation shifting their main effort in management into the concept of Learning Organisation is due it concrete and natural way of developing for success that is through learning. Learning organisation has been stable construct in the studies of HRD for over 20 years (Lundberg, 1989; Senge 1990) and still highly debated at wide and globally.  The concept also regarded as a first-order adaptation to changing environment based on experience, learning from the past and errors that occur in the organization. Today, voluminous of research are conducted under field of Learning Organization in exploring what organization need to do in order to become learning organization. The only sustainability and survivability for organisation to keep breathing and propelling for success is to develop and understand how to manage learning in the organization.  An organization with necessary learning organizational structures and capacities are able to create environment that will encourage and stimulate knowledge and ultimately boasting financial performance (Watson and Warsick, 1993)

 

Many underlying theories which constantly emerge in support of Learning Organization concept. From early 60’s there was continuous effort from management scholar to define and unravel the embedded theories that hidden under this concept. Crossan et al. (2000) proposed a framework of organizational learning by emphasising on changing process that driven by intuition and interpretation at the individual level, subsequently integration of new knowledge at the group level and eventually institutionalization at the organizational level as formed as Learning Organization.  While March (1991) agreed that learning in the organization involve the activity of exploiting current knowledge and exploring new knowledge that leads to growth and improvement in organization. Earlier, Levitt & March (1988) had claimed learning as inference drawn from both formal and informal experiences which fuelled organization to find new routines.in another aspects, Huber (1991) sees organisation learning as processual chain of acquisition, distribution and interpretation to organizational memory. By this process, organization will identify meaningful knowledge that are valuable to retained and stored in the organization memory. As time take place and gradual understanding of the concept, scholars more seeing Organisation as catalyst of change and transformation (Watkins & Marsick 1993).  Subsequently incoming of Twenty-first century, this concept has move beyond their own capacity by embrace the learning across the organizations which supported by many researcher namely Jerez Gomez (2005), Senge (1990) and Goh (1998).  This new phenomena of alliances has allow connection with its own external environment thus lead to more favourable condition for becoming a learning organization. Tendencies of looking at Leadership also came along to the concept which immensely required to support creating the conditions and controlling financial resources needed to become learning organization (Jeres-Gomez, 2005)