How Does Ibm Transform Individual Learning Into Organizational Learning?

MGT302 - Org. Behavior and Teamwork

Individual and organizational learning

WHAT IS ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING?

Weick (1991) argues that the defining property of learning is the combination of same stimulus and different responses, however it is rare in organizations meaning either organizations don't learn or that organizations learn but in nontraditional ways. He further notes: "Perhaps organizations are not built to learn. Instead, they are patterns of means-ends relations deliberately designed to make the same routine response to different stimuli, a pattern which is antithetical to learning in the traditional sense" (p. 119). Or else, he argues, Organizational Learning perhaps involves a different kind of learning than has been described in the past: "the process within the organization by which knowledge about action-outcome relationships and the effect of the environment on these relationships is developed" (Duncan & Weiss 1979). In his view, "a more radical approach would take the position that individual learning occurs when people give a different response to the same stimulus, but Organizational Learning occurs when groups of people give the same response to different stimuli." {3}

Argyris (1977) defines organizational learning as the process of "detection and correction of errors." In his view organizations learn through individuals acting as agents for them: "The individuals' learning activities, in turn, are facilitated or inhibited by an ecological system of factors that may be called an organizational learning system" (p. 117). {3}

what is a learning organization?

McGill et al. (1992) define the Learning Organization as "a company that can respond to new information by altering the very "programming" by which information is processed and evaluated. {3}

organizational learning vs learning organizational

McGill et al. (1992) do not distinguish between Learning Organization and Organizational Learning. They define Organizational...