Organizational learning is an exciting, new approach to organization development. To learn in an organizational context is to gain knowledge and skills accompanied by a desirable change in behavior. Learning is indispensable to survival and growth. Organizational learning is even more indispensable in societies undergoing profound changes, in domains of activity in which technological changes or competitive pressures are mounting, and in domains that are getting more and more complicated due to increasing legal, political, or social constraints. Organizational learning has immense importance in third world societies. The third world organizations– especially the strategic ones have to learn much in order to operate effectively. The more learning oriented they are despite the ingrained conservatism of the societies in which they function, the faster they would learn to be effective, and the faster too, would be the socio-economic development of their societies development. Management styles that spur organizational learning may, therefore be especially valuable and those that impede organizational learning should be avoided.
Learning is important not only for organisations but for each and every individual. Learning comes from experience, practice. It is relatively permanent. The more the organisation learns, the more it flourishes and grows. Learning hence is given a lot of importance by organisations today. There are various sources through which an organisation can learn. They are as follows:
Self Analysis ( Introspection)
Its People ( Employees, Managers)
From other organisations
Past Failures
Past successes
Observation of business environment
Learning is also important due to the following reasons: to fight competition, to grow, to improve efficiency, to manage people effectively, to gain leadership, to provide better services to customers, to take better decisions and to increase profits. Today competition has become a buzzword. If one needs to survive one needs to be better than the other in terms of price, quality, delivery etc. Hence an organisation needs to learn from other organisation who is better than it so as to provide better service to customers.
Innovation today occupies a central position, one who innovates comes out with a novel product, captures the market. But to innovate one needs to know what are the customer needs and it is possible only if organisations learn from the customers through their various associations with the customer. Thus learning from the customer forms the crux of innovation and organizational success.
An organization’s product is like a stimulus to the customer which definitely bring out some response and this is what needs to be monitored and learned from. Learning should also take place from the employees as they are associated with organisation for more than a number of years. The organisation is like a peer to them, they know its processes and hence through their experience are able to tell whether the processes can be improved or they need modification or changes etc.
Learning from other organisations i.e. benchmarking has been a constant source of learning. It give a chance to develop and grow. Basically a self introspection takes place.
Past failures and successes, as they guide behaviour tells us what to do and what not which forms an important source of learning; thus saving the valuable resources of an organisation from being wasted.
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