MGT101 Fundamentals of Management- Learning Organization

A learning organization is an organization that goes through various changes in difficult times and adapts to different environments as per requirements. The effect of different kinds of business environment is very important in this matter. In the competitive market in these days, the all the business organizations have to seek new ways for keeping a firm hold in their industry (Weng and McElroy 2012). This helps them to keep well ahead of their business competitors and gain the competitive advantage over them (Wagner and Hollenbeck 2014).

They are always under pressure of developing and growing so that they can become the leading organization in the industry. There are some steps by which the organizations have to gather the knowledge for applying in the practical field. The concept of this ‘Learning Organization’ was developed by Peter Senge as he went through a research on that. There are definitely some benefits and challenges when applying this mode of management tactics. Leadership development is an integral part of organizational success and it has a very strong connection with the learning organization (R?ducan and R?ducan 2014). Leading the organizations, innovating new things is the key to the growth of the organization (Bhuvanaiah and Raya 2014).

The key purpose of organizational learning is to execute the development plans for both the organizations and the employees. There are a number of methods, tools and techniques by which the managers of a learning organization can motivate the employees and show them the way to success (Bhuvanaiah and Raya 2014). In a learning organization, the framework of Total Management and Development can be followed so that feedbacks can be taken from the consumers about their products, reviews can be arranged with an in-depth analysis among the organizational leaders, managers and employees (Goetsch and Davis 2014). In this process, the performance of the employees has to be assessed and their strengths have to be identified. The areas that are needed to be improved are also discussed among them. When, these steps take place, employees get motivated and they learn new tactics to achieve their goals in the organizational structure. This helps them to bring them the organizational success (Bhuvanaiah and Raya 2014).

The managers have to be pretty confident and cautious in applying those techniques because the employees are associated with this entire process. The managers have to make the employees understand about what the implications will be of organizational learning and what will they achieve through this process (Argote 2012).

Brief Overview about the company

Woolworths is an Australian supermarket chain organization which is headquartered at Bella Vista in New South Wales (Woolworths Online 2017). This organization is one of the leading organizations in the retail industry having served in the areas like the entire Australia, New Zealand and even India. They have targeted to have a firm hold on Asian market as well through India and China (Woolworths Online 2017). It is almost a 100 years old company that has built faith on their customers. In this changing business environment, it takes very little time to change the entire scenario. According to the Porters’ Five Forces, the threats of the new entrants and the substitutes are always on the consideration (Dobbs 2014). The management of the organization has to understand that there are new rivals like Coles Supermarket and others who are trying hard to capture the industry by applying their strengths and resolving their weaknesses so that they can gain the maximum advantage over their rivals (www.coles.com.au 2017). The competition and rivalry between the organizations is so fierce that firms are always looking to form a loyal customer base by assessing their consumer behavior (Solomon 2014).

Characteristics of the Learning Organization

The learning organizations have to go through the major transformations to adjust to the business environment and the management of the organizations has to follow some guidelines by which they can apply these characteristics in their companies. Learning organizations guide their employees in many ways because the employees are the backbones of the organization and their hard work can bring success to the organization (Weng and McElroy 2012). There are fairly five characteristics that a learning organization has and they are as follows:-

a) Systems Thinking

Systems’ thinking is the first part of the conceptual framework of the learning organization (Argote 2012). According to this part, people think business as a bounded object. This method of thinking is used by the learning organization when the organization is assessed and the performance of the organization is collected from the information systems. According to this technique, all the characteristics of the organization must be clear and if any one of them is missing, it cannot achieve its goals. The characteristics of learning organizations have to be acquired and not developed (Argote 2012). This method integrates all the employees and disciplines of the organization and fuses them to one.

b) Personal Mastery

The importance of individual learning is immense in context of organizational learning (Argote 2012). It is not sure that the organizations can learn on the basis of individual learning but individual learning has to take place for the other. An individual’s knowledge has to be clarified and it should offer deep insight into the organizational matters. This learning by the individual within the organization is known as personal mastery. The individuals have to learn quickly, they have to be given proper training and opportunities for skill development and finally they should go through self-improvement. This will lead the organizations to gain competitive advantage over other rivals (Wagner and Hollenbeck 2014). The personal mastery culture should be developed within the organization so that they can learn through different incidents and the organizations would benefit from that (Bhuvanaiah and Raya 2014).

c) Mental Models

Mental models are the assumptions that are held by the individuals as well as the organizations. These assumptions must be challenged if an organization wants to become a learning organization (Argote 2012). When an organization wants to create a learning environment within, it has to remove the confrontational attitudes so that the open culture can replace it with trust among the employees. The values and norms that are not needed must be removed by a process called ‘unlearning’. It is obvious that when an organization decides to work with mental models, it has to go through in-depth learning procedure and skill development (Gallie et al. 2012).

d) Buiding Shared Vision

An organization must have a long-term vision of innovating new things and experimenting with various new things so that the organization can benefit from that. Leadership in organizations has a huge role to play in this matter as all the staff of the organization must have a shared picture of the organizational growth (Weng and McElroy 2012). All the employees have to learn new things in common and they are motivated in this way for the organizational growth. The organizational success depends a lot on the visions of the individuals as a common goal setting by the employees would lead to the success of the organizations as a whole (Bhuvanaiah and Raya 2014).

e) Team Learning

In a learning organization, the employees work as a team and they share their common visions and their teamwork leads them to organizational success (Bhuvanaiah and Raya 2014). They can accumulate all their knowledge and expertise into one and then they can work on cumulative success (West 2012). Boundary crossing and openness are features are a must that encourages team learning. The members of the team share their ideas; gather their individual learning and this helps to access them a new horizon of organizational learning (Argote 2012).

In Woolworths, all these characteristics are present because they have to tackle the daily challenges in their own business environment (Woolworths Online 2017). They have to follow these characteristics so that they can get their desired success in the retail industry by beating their rivals. Thus, Woolworths limited is appropriate to be called a learning organization (Argote 2012).

Conclusion

After a thorough discussion on learning organization, it can be concluded that learning organizations really take up the initiatives to take up the competition and they can struggle in every way to keep its place in the competition market. It is very important to transform and gain competitive advantage in order to survive. Woolworths has fulfilled the criteria to be called a learning organization as they have all the characteristics in them. Organizational learning is indeed necessary for the uplifting of the organizations through growth. 

References

Argote, L., 2012. Organizational learning: Creating, retaining and transferring knowledge. Springer Science & Business Media.

Bhuvanaiah, T. and Raya, R.P., 2014. Employee engagement: key to organizational success. SCMS journal of Indian Management, 11(4), p.61.

E. Dobbs, M., 2014. Guidelines for applying Porter's five forces framework: a set of industry analysis templates.Competitiveness Review,24(1), pp.32-45.

Gallie, D., Zhou, Y., Felstead, A. and Green, F., 2012. Teamwork, skill development and employee welfare. British Journal of Industrial Relations, 50(1), pp.23-46.

Goetsch, D.L. and Davis, S.B., 2014. Quality management for organizational excellence. Upper Saddle River, NJ: pearson.

R?ducan, R. and R?ducan, R., 2014. Leadership and Management. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 149, pp.808-812.

Solomon, M.R., 2014. Consumer behavior: Buying, having, and being (Vol. 10). Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Wagner III, J.A. and Hollenbeck, J.R., 2014. Organizational behavior: Securing competitive advantage. Routledge.

Weng, Q. and McElroy, J.C., 2012. Organizational career growth, affective occupational commitment and turnover intentions. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 80(2), pp.256-265.

West, M.A., 2012. Effective teamwork: Practical lessons from organizational research. John Wiley & Sons.

Woolworths Online. (2017). Woolworths Supermarket - Buy Groceries Online. [online] Available at: https://www.woolworths.com.au/ [Accessed 2 Jun. 2017].

www.coles.com.au. (2017). Coles Australia. [online] Available at: https://www.coles.com.au/ [Accessed 1 Jun. 2017].