Current businesses face many challenges: tough global competition, rapid technology change and increased pressure from consumers are only a few to name. Ability to adapt quickly to this fast changing environment became crucial for the survival of the company, thus knowledge and continuous learning is growing in importance. Knowledge is seen as an ultimate competitive advantage for the modern organization. However, Dr. Yogesh Malhotra (2003), the founding Chairman and Chief Knowledge Architect of the BRINT Institute, LLC, says that “knowledge is the ultimate competitive advantage only if understood from an action-oriented perspective. <….> Only translating information <…> into actionable value propositions can assure competitive advantage”. One way of emphasizing learning and turning knowledge into action is through the development of a learning organization (Gardiner et al., 2001, cited in Stafylarakis, Eldridge, 2008).
In this paper I want to shortly look at the concept of a learning organization and discuss the major issues involved in the development of a learning organization in a medium sized construction company.
Learning organization
The notion of the learning organization has been made popular by Peter Senge and his book “The Fifth Discipline” (1990) (Smith, 2001). According him, the learning organization “is continually expanding its capacity to create its future through learning” (Senge, 1990, cited in Stafylarakis, Eldridge, 2008:10). Different authors (ex. Pedler et al. 1989, Watkins and Marsick 1992, cited in Stafylarakis, Eldridge, 2008 ) came up with different definitions of the learning organization, but most of them agree on the idea of continuous transformation. The idea of the learning organization even thoug ...