Organisational Learning

An integrated HR and knowledge management perspective

Roderick Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317506430
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Organizational Learning: An Integrated HR and Knowledge Management Perspe ctive draws on a broad and multi-disciplinary base to look at the origins and practice of organizational learning. It critically considers the nature of organizational knowledge as a social construct; pedagogical issues around learning as individuals, groups, teams and whole organisations; and technological issues around the development of knowledge-based information systems. Supporting case studies are provided throughout the book, and readers will also benefit from a companion website which expands on the key themes of the text.

Organizational Learning will enable readers to develop and implement strategies for ensuring long-term access to the embedded knowledge and experience of an organization. This textbook will be invaluable reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students on organizational learning, HRM and knowledge management courses.

Part 1 Organisational learning

Key theories and models

1 The relationship between the individual and the organisation

DOI: 10.4324/9781315716251-1

Learning outcomes:

1. Identify the humanistic characteristics of organisational learning.
2. Understand the collaborative nature of organisational learning.
3. Identify the characteristics associated with experiential and work-based learning.
4. Understand elements of organisational behaviour relating to theories-in-use.
5. Identify the elements in key models of the learning organisation (LO).
6. Understand the implications associated with the application of the LO models.

Organisational learning (OL) can be regarded as emerging from the more humanistic approaches to management. These have challenged more scientific approaches, associated with Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) and the production processes of Henry Ford (1863–1947). Organisation development (OD) associated with Richard Beckhard (1928–99) has focused on the ‘connect’ between the extent to which an individual is disengaged from the aims and objectives of the organisation and the non-achievement of these aims and objectives. To become an organisation that is capable of meeting the challenge of change, this relationship needs to be brought to centre stage. Humanistic management styles have attempted to address this and are based on three key elements:

• The concept of human dignity.
• An ethical basis for decision making.
• Decision making based on dialogue.

Human dignity addresses the relationship that the individual might have with the organisation. It forms the basis of both the structure and the process that define the organisation. It seeks to embed autonomy as a principle of practice, itself based on the assumption that there exists a positive correlation between employee satisfaction and efficiency and, ultimately, productivity. In looking to achieve and embed this there is a need to address the ethical dimension to organisational practices and processes. Difficult as this is to consistently interpret, in relation to practice, there is nevertheless a key relationship between the concepts associated with postmodernity and humanistic management. This is based on the acceptance of the fluidity and dynamism associated with the postmodern and the need to base decision making on rich and constantly evolving dialogue. Embedded within this dialogue is the necessary opportunity to constantly seek the ethical ‘route’ and to a large extent it is this commitment to engage in dialogue at this level and to this extent, that forms the basis of the postmodern approach to ethics.

Organisational learning and the perceived need to develop a learning organisation (LO) requires a fundamental review of the relationship between the individual and the organisation, and as such is concerned with aspects relating to organisational behaviour. Here theorists, such as Elton Mayo (1880–1949), have driven the development of humanistic approaches to understanding behaviour in organisations and the importance of the relationship between the individual and the organisation. As an element of organisational practice this places OL within the context of human resource management (HRM).

Theories of organisational behaviour draw on a range of disciplines including:

• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Sociology
• Anthropology.

Key theories consider specific characteristics of organisational behaviour and seek to illustrate that collective learning is at least a possibility, if all of the factors necessary are identified and supported.

However, this identification and support only takes us so far. The issue of why we might want to learn collectively and how an organisation might encourage us to do so is a very personal and individual matter. Nobody can force you to think what you don’t want to think! Could we even begin to justify, ethically, attempts to manipulate individuals in this type of way? These are important questions for OL, particularly when viewing the management of knowledge within a less structured context.

Marsick and Watkins (1999a) identified the development of learning as an organisational practice (see Table 1.1). The shift here is from directed to undirected, from one-way to two-way, and from learning being the identification of specific skills to a more holistic need to develop understanding. This shifts responsibility from the manager to the individual and in doing so it impacts upon the structure of the organisation itself. It will ultimately challenge the more structured models of organisational design and replace these with open, more egalitarian models.

Action-based learning models frequently lead to changes in the system as a whole because learners question collective values, belief systems and ways of organising work in their search for solutions. The action project causes dissonance, which enables unfreezing of old ways.

(Marsick and Watkins 1999b: 206)

Table 1.1 Learning and organisational practice

Metaphor	Nature of work	Organisation’s Structure	Learning
Machine instruction	Highly structured	Hierarchical	One-way
Open system	Interactive	Networked	Negotiated
Brains	Self-regulated	Autonomous	Informal/continuous
Chaos/complexity	Self-initiated	Decentralised	Action-based

This creation of dissonance is a characteristic of the environment and of the ongoing experience of the organisation. An experience has value where it might add to existing experience. Unless an experience is different it will lack any real value and therefore, the context of surprise, the experience of puzzlement and even confusion are valuable as learning experiences. Likewise, the explicit experiences of others to challenge and counter embedded views adds to this rich mix of experiential learning. It is founded on uncertainty and doubt and because of this requires the wider learning environment to be one that is supportive and where each learner has at least learnt to trust the others. Uncertainty is a positive ingredient where it is a common universal experience and can in itself help to build the required trust through the sense of shared uncertainty.

2 The centrality of experience

DOI: 10.4324/9781315716251-2

In exploring OL it is important to remain focused on the wider theoretical and ethical context within which it sits. It is necessary to look at manifestations of collective learning and collective learning contexts. Specifically, we need to examine learning itself, followed by learning in work-based contexts and the notion of experiential learning. In doing this we ultimately emphasise the need for reflective professional practitioners. Practitioners who can understand the extent of their knowledge, drawn from their experience, and are willing to share this with others for the benefit of the organisation, will be effective OL practitioners.

As an emerging discipline, OL has drawn on the recognition of knowledge as an organisational asset and that if this asset is to be of value to the organisation there needs to be an explicit mechanism for its management. Given the nature of the knowledge asset and its roots in the day-to-day experience of individuals, there is a need to consider the nature of experiential learning (EL).

Experiential learning (EL) recognizes and celebrates knowledge generated outside institutions. If learning can be defined as change or transformation, in the sense of expanding our range of possibilities and action, experiential learning is expansion that challenges the hegemonic logic of expert knowledge, refuses disciplinary knowledge claims of universal validity, and resists knowledge authority based solely on scientific evidence.

(Fenwick 2003)

Tara Fenwick’s comment above at once illustrates the inherent separation that we feel between work and learning. Learning has become associated with formal education, but this perception has been developed from a point where this separation was not recognised. In other words, there was a time where we learnt directly from others and knowledge was transferred from one to another without necessarily the interjection of the ‘educator’. Lave and Wenger (1991) are often associated with the coining of the related concept of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ which closely considers this idea of the individual being drawn away and separated from learning – or the imposition of the educator.

‘Legitimate peripheral participation’ provides a way to speak about the relations between newcomers and old-timers, and about activities, identities, artefacts, and communities of knowledge and practice. It concerns the process by which newcomers become part of a community of practice. A person’s intentions to learn are engaged and the meaning of learning is configured through the process of becoming a full participant in a socio-cultural practice. This social process includes, indeed subsumes, the learning of knowledgeable skills.

(Lave and Wenger 1991: 29)

What we can identify here is a changing relationship between work and learning. The learning organisation is an expression of this still fluid and dynamic relationship. It has flowed from Lave and Wenger’s position above, to learning being seen as an intrinsic good in its own right and back to the need to marry learning with work-based practice. However, when we come to examine and consider learning as it occurs in the workplace we face a number of issues. Not least:

• What is the role of the educator?

If you place yourself within a familiar organisational environment and ask yourself, where you learnt, the likelihood is that you will say that you learnt from the social group around you, and largely informally. You might also have experienced the formally arranged training sessions that form the basis of induction and ongoing programmes of professional development. These programmes are reflecting the need to formally embed learning as an organisational practice and OL differs from these programmes only in its more full engagement with the knowledge asset itself. Primarily, this focuses on the need to impose a formal, managed structure upon something that often and intrinsically recoils from this formality and indeed thrives on its inherent informality. On the one hand there is a need to manage explicit knowledge and there is an equal need to have this knowledge circulated effectively through the mechanisms and networks that form the basis of the organisation’s information system.

Experiential learning forms the basis of knowledge creation and OL concerns itself with the transformation of this knowledge into an organisational asset. Experiential learning and OL are key components of an organisational learning programme (OLP), and they feed the knowledge-based information system that completes the engagement necessary to realise the transformation of personal experience (referred to as our tacit knowledge) to a form that can be used and applied by the group or the whole organisation (referred to as our explicit knowledge). The OLP concerns itself with the making of tacit knowledge explicit.

Experiential learning is, therefore, a crucial element of the socially embedded nature of the knowledge asset. It asks questions of the organisation and in turn places certain pressures on the organisation. David Boud (2003) has identified these new pressures that are being placed on practice as a result, to some extent, of this need to learn, to identify the learning processes and ultimately to understand how it is we learn at work.

We are asking ourselves now, how is it that people actually learn in real settings? And, how can learning be promoted everywhere? The answer is not the one we expect. It is not just more RPL [Recognition of Prior Learning], more courses and more web-based programs. But I suspect it will be a more reflexive development in which the major learning interventions involve noticing what we are doing, what gets in the way of doing it better and how we do it in congenial ways with those we interact with.

This has been called informal learning, but that term undervalues the most important learning of all. The new challenge to practice is to find ways of acknowledging how we and others learn in our many locations and build on that without the act of formalising learning destroying what we are trying to foster.

(Boud 2003)

Lave and Wenger (1991) ident...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1 Organisational learning: key theories and models
• PART 2 Organisational learning: key principles and contexts
• PART 3 Developing organisational learning programmes
• PART 4 SPADES
• PART 5 Reflection on the discipline of organisational learning
• Bibliography
• Index