The learning organisation : a literature synthesis to show the link between learning and performance

M.Comm.The world is changing. That is the one thing that managers can be sure of Business oftoday will not be the same the next day. Amidst these changes, organisations struggle to survive. Many of them will not see the tomorrows. Many have failed, and the ever-increasing unemployment rates and crime rates in South Africa are the sad testimony to this fact. Managing change is not an easy task. It is complex, and managers need to consider many things at the same time. It is however critical. Some managers confess that they do not know what to do or how to manage change. There is a need for a management idea consistent with human nature that will help organisations face change and adapt to the turbulent business world in order to maintain their competitive advantage and survive into the 21st century. Learning and the capacity to manage change are directly related. Could learning be the one strategy that will help organisations to stay competitive and to survive? This study shows that learning and performance of organisations are related and finds a management idea to apply learning in an organisation that will achieve the desired effect on the organisation's performance. Learning is a natural human activity that cannot take place without action or without experiencing the results of action. Empirical evidence in literature shows the established link between learning and performance. A variety of definitions for the concept of a learning organisation appear in academic and business writings. Writers define the concept of a learning organisation at different levels. From merely defining a learning organisation as the sum of the learning of its members, or defining a learning organisation as an organisation that focuses on improving its processes, products and services, to defining a learning organisation as an organisation able to create what it desires.~ ..... Senge' s learning organisation is then described. What Senge calls the fifth discipline is at the heart of the idea of the learning organisation. The fifth discipline is systems thinking, 4 which is described as a discipline for seeing wholes. The other four core disciplines of building a learning organisation are personal mastery, mental models, shared vision and team learning. Managers often want to know if their organisations could be classified as learning organisations. They also want to know what they must do to tum their organisations into learning organisations and what they must avoid in the process. Chapter 4 states research that developed a model for determining to what extent an organisation is a learning organisation. It is concluded that all organisations could be classified as a learning organisation to some extent. There are things that an organisation can do to become more of a learning organisation, or to become a Learning Organisation with capital letters, the five discipline variety. They are discussed in Chapter 4. In the conclusion of this study a few areas that could benefit from further research are identified. The lack of comprehensive empirical research confirming the relationship between learning and improved performance, the opportunity for developing a measuring instrument that could measure learning and the performance of learning organisations, to clearly define learning and the learning organisation, and the possibility of a structured development tool to help organisations become learning organisations