What Are the Different Forms of Organisational Learning

STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT

What are the different forms of organisational learning and how can these concepts be useful?

Organisations today are faced with a constant change and very turbulent economic environment. Due to fast growing economies and need to survive in such a “hostile” environment organizations are enforced to continuously seek for different approaches on how to achieve sustainable competitive advantage.

As Senge (1990) remarks: "The rate at which organizations learn may become the only sustainable source of competitive advantage." Continuous learning in organisations was presented as a requirement and advocated by Argyris and Schon in 1978.

“Organisational learning has been viewed as a source of competitive advantage that helps organisations respond to changes in their institutional environments via adopting and diffusing innovations that will contribute towards improving their performance”. (Sisaye and Birnberg, xiii)

Pressures from globalization, technology developments, mergers and acquisitions are testing organisations and forcing them to learn how to anticipate and respond to these rapid changes, complexities and most importantly uncertainties that are hard to predict.

Schein (1983) argues that there are three levels of organizational learning culture, cognitive, behavioral and artifactual, where:

1. Behavioral learning deals with the capacity of organizational processes, structures and systems to support learning.

1. Cognitive learning opposite to behavioral is focused on the individual capacity to change their mental cognition and abilities to attain, develop and interpret the knowledge, also known as act of process of knowing.

Behavioral and cognitive learning have different forms in organizational learning. Behavioral change can occur without any association of cognitive change, or contrary to that there could be knowledge gain that is not reflected with any behavioral change.

Key forms of organizational...