Learning Organization
Gurpreet Gill
MGT / 426
April 21, 2015
Diannah Thomas

In the modern business world, the working environments for all different types of business organizations have seen massive amounts of change. This factor is due largely in part to situations like globalization and the constant cycles of development in information technologies. Business organizations have no choice anymore but to face and accommodate this new business environment. Change in the business environment is never as easy as it seems, and each organization will face its own unique ways of implementing change. This means that management will have to formulate new methods of implementing change each time so that they are distinctive from the last change methods. Unfortunately, for management, there is no one distinct and universal method for implementing change and creating a business-learning environment. In addition to the roles of management, employees will also have to learn to adapt and overcome the obstacles and implement new various techniques. To create a learning environment, both managers and employees have to learn to work together to study, spot, and correct these errors and learn from them.
What is Learning Organization?
Organizations must create a culture that supports and encourages ongoing employee learning. The organization must take risks, encourage critical thinking as well as promote new ideas from every member. Organizations should value employee’s contributions and provides for mistakes while experimenting and learning from experience (Business Dictionary, 2015). A true learning organization will disseminate the new knowledge throughout the company or corporation and include the knowledge in their everyday activities. Generally many cases occur that a learning organization is being acknowledged by a particular relationship between the members of the organization. The employees therefore has the capacity to communicate with ease, sensitive with the ideas of every member of the organization, and able to develop communication incessantly.
The Roles of Management
The people involved in the management position are the ones responsible for creating new strategies for the learning organization. The role they have to play involves building and applying the brand new organizational capabilities. Feedback should also be considered by the management that are coming from different operations and make this feedback useful in terms of adjusting the environmental factors and managing change resources. The most crucial part is the need of a business organization to develop strategies responding to various factors indicated below:
Technological evolution
Changes in demography
Global structures
Change of the target market of the organization
Skills of members of the organization
The perception of what is success and what is failure
In a learning organization, the management aspires that all of their managerial activities are supporting organizational build up. In this fashion, the management shall ascertain that the capabilities and skills of its employees are anchored in one direction but developed differently.
The Roles of Employees
Employees should learn that they play a significant role in implementing change. The employees are deemed to develop the newer perspective on how to deal with the current situation.
Teamwork can best apply so that the employees can freely share ideas, information and issues. Employees are encouraged to work with a group rather than working alone. As what Senge suggested (1990), there are several principles that are relevant with the development of employees' skills within a learning organization:
Learning and knowing personal skills and capabilities
Assessing personal beliefs
Establishing teams in collaboration
Considering the thought that the actions of every member of the organization can affect the whole system and performance of everyone
Senge’s Five Disciplines
Peter Senge, in 1990