Organization Learning Concept and Its Contributions

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Introduction

Organization learning is arguably one of the most important business concepts that any organization must embrace if it were to maintain a competitive edge during this volatile market trends.

Organization learning basically means the process of acquiring new business concepts, knowledge, experience and ideas and intelligently integrating what is learned with previous knowledge to create new and innovative products either technological, business ideas or management to gain a competitive edge over other competitors by offering excellent services to their invaluable customers.

This paper addresses how organization learning contributes to innovation, competitiveness, and economic-financial results and also how successful the article is in relating organization learning with business performance.

Contribution of organization learning to innovation

Organization learning involves well-planned acquisition, distribution, interpretation and comparison of knowledge with previous knowledge and experience in all organizational structures of the organization.

The knowledge obtained from organizational learning is used in developing superior products and services and also more effective management in all aspects of the organization. This results to dynamic innovation not only of new brands, products and services to customers but also excellent management that will leave the customers with customer experience (Serrat, 2009).

I concur with Lopez, Peon, and Ordas (2005) that “learning-oriented organizations are able to quickly reconfigure their architecture and reallocate their resources to focus on emerging opportunities or threats” (Lopez, Peon, and Ordas, 2005, p. 230).

Toyota industry has always applied this concept whereby they either learn from current demands of low emission more fuel-efficient policies and genius marketing strategies.

They have also continuously learned from mistakes as was seen when they recalled some of their models. The Toyota Company has continuously developed its brands to form better models that are always competitive at the market (Lopez, Peon, and Ordas, 2005).

Contribution of organization learning to competitiveness

We are living in a world where everything changes in a flash second. For organizations to maintain their brands on this dynamic market they have to employ organization learning. Organization learning ensures that organizations are well equipped with previous knowledge, experience and the acquired knowledge which they carefully organize to create dynamic products which are unique.

This is simply blending what you already know and newly acquired knowledge to predict the future needs of your customers and this makes sure organization will always remain competitive.

This is suggested by Lopez, Peon, and Ordas (2005) “learning, through better knowledge and understanding, facilitates behavior change that leads to improve performance” (Lopez, Peon, and Ordas, p. 230).

Successful organizations such as Microsoft continuously learn from previous models, marketing concepts and overall management strategies to continuously maintain a competitive edge in the most dynamic field of business (Lopez, Peon, and Ordas, 2005).

Economic financial result

Organization learning encompasses careful and guided employment of knowledge to make sure that every aspect of the organization works towards one common objective of delivering services that will create customer experience and confidence. This will ensure that the organization will remain relevant in the market and the outcome will be sustained profits.

Organization learning also ensures superior overall management of the organization whereby everyone in the organization works towards one common objective of realizing the vision and mission objectives that were set in the process of establishing organization learning.

The report by Lopez, Peon, and Ordas (2005) claimed that effective organization learning should “lead directly to superior outcomes, such as greater new product success, superior customer retention, higher customer-defined quality, and, ultimately superior growth and/or profitability” (Lopez, Peon, and Ordas p. 230).

Increased organizational performance

Organizational learning requires the participation of everyone in the organization in terms of continual learning from previous and current challenges of the organization and thinking of creative response. The organization is able to act as a unit towards a common objective.

This improves the overall management of the organization leading to increased organizational performance I concur with Lopez, Peon, and Ordas (2005) that “The knowledge generated in this way is translated into new models of activity, routines and logic in the organization” (Lopez, Peon, and Ordas, 2005, p. 230).

Perhaps this can be seen from the management of the Virgin brands, which have proved their worth with time. Through continuous organization learning, Virgin has been able to attain high levels of organizational performance despite the wide range of brands all over the world (Lopez, Peon, and Ordas, 2005).

Success of the article in relating organization learning with business performance

The article has well-outlined definition and interpretation of the concept of organization learning that was easy to relate to however the relation of organization learning to business performance though successful was a little bit too complex.

The article outlines the methods that were used to relate the two in terms of setting out hypothesis for the research and the methods of information gathering the statistics obtained were correlated to various aspects of business performance.

The article finally concludes that some of the results obtained are related to business performance “Therefore, these results indicate support for the notion that organizational learning influences financial performance both directly and indirectly through its impact on innovation and competitiveness” (Lopez, Peon, and Ordas, 2005, p. 238).

Conclusion

Organization learning is a core requirement of any organization that dreams of sustaining its prowess in the ever-changing market.

Effective organization learning was observed to positively contribute to competitiveness and economic-financial results by ensuring that learned knowledge is organized and used effectively for the benefit of the organization. The article though a little bit complex was effective in relating organization learning with business performance. It is therefore important that all business organizations embrace this concept.

References

Lopez, S., Peon, J. and Ordas, C. (2005) Organizational Learning as a Determining Factor in Business Performance. The Learning Organization Vol. 12 No. 3, 2005 pp. 227-245.

Serrat, O. (2009) Building a Learning Organization. Web.

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