Learning Organization and Attributes

Learning Organisation And Essential Attributes

A learning organization is the term given to a company that facilitates the learning of its members and continuously transforms itself. Learning organizations develop as a result of the pressures facing modern organizations and enable them to remain competitive in the business environment. Such an organization acquires knowledge and innovates fast enough to survive and thrive in a rapidly changing environment.

Learning organizations:
• Create a culture that encourages and supports continuous employee learning, critical thinking, and risk taking with new ideas,
• Allow mistakes, and value employee contributions,
• Learn from experience and experiment, and
• Disseminate the new knowledge throughout the organization for incorporation into day-to-day activities.

Learning organizations are important in:

• Maintaining levels of innovation and remaining competitive
• Being better placed to respond to external pressures
• Having the knowledge to better link resources to customer needs
• Improving quality of outputs at all levels
• Improving Corporate image by becoming more people oriented
• Increasing the pace of change within the organization

Attributes of learning Organizations are:

A learning organization exhibits five main characteristics:
• Systems thinking
• Personal mastery
• Mental models
• Shared vision
• Team learning

Systems thinking: ‘The idea of the learning organization developed from a body of work called systems thinking.’
• This conceptual framework allows people to study businesses as bounded objects.
• These methods of thinking are used while assessing the company and have information systems that measure the performance of the organization as a whole and of its various components.
• Systems thinking states that all the characteristics must be apparent at once in an organization for it to be a learning organization. If some of these