The Learning Organisation: Validating A Measuring Instrument

The EFMD reports in their Survey Summary Service (2006) that the topic of “The Learning Organisation” ranked in that year as the second most enduring idea about strategy and business, out of ten ideas most likely to last at least another ten years. Management literature contains a considerable number of references to the learning organisation and its characteristics.  An instrument developed by Pedler, et al. (1991) to measure eleven characteristics of the learning organisation was used in the present study to measure the degree to which respondents considered their own organizations to conform to the eleven characteristics ascribed to the learning organisation. The aim of this paper is to report on the research and analyses being undertaken to better understand the factor structure and content of the construct, as well as the predictive and discriminatory validity of the same instrument. Item Analysis, Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis were used for this purpose. The predictive/discriminatory validity of the instrument, which has been proved to be uni-dimensional, was investigated by means of One-way Analysis of Variance, Stepwise Discrimination Analysis and Discrimination Analysis. The results indicate that the instrument can adequately distinguish between respondents from different economic sectors and organisations as well as differentiate respondents in terms of some other variables. The study should be regarded as entirely applicable to the South African cultural and organizational environments