Organizational Learning Toward A Unifying Framework

Thought-provoking papers on the relatively new field of organizational improvisation, which consider the pressures on organizations to react continually to today's ever-changing environment.

In order to face the challenge of effective organizational learning in our public policies, we need to address three pressing questions: 1. How does learning work in our public organizations? 2. What promising practices can we implement to advance learning in public organizations? 3. What changes in public management are required to combine learning with the growing demands of performance and accountability? This book is an attempt to address those questions in a systematic and empirical manner. The answers presented in this volume are the result of a four-year empirical research project conducted in Polish ministries and study visits in public institutions of twelve countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

This core textbook, edited by five leading scholars of the subject, provides a comprehensive overview of the key topics, debates and themes in this increasingly important field. Balancing research-led theory with industry best-practice to provide students with a definitive overview of HRD, the book draws on the international experience of its authors to tackle topics as diverse as leadership and managing development, change and diversity, workplace learning, and graduate employability. The book's approachable yet thorough writing style and lively presentation helps students to understand the topic from a critical perspective while also demonstrating how HRD plays out in reality. This is an essential textbook for undergraduate, postgraduate and MBA students of Human Resource Development on HRD or Business and Management degree programmes. New to this Edition: - New contributors and revised content, including additional coverage of careers, career management and employability - More international coverage, especially of the EU - Inclusion of topical subjects including employee engagement, skills shortage and business partnering - Improved student-friendly pedagogy and updated figures and diagrams to appeal to different learning styles - Thoroughly updated references and web links

This brand new and innovative core textbook fuses topics from the related fields of organizational behaviour and human resource management to provide new insight into the interconnectedness of these important and complementary areas. The text takes an integrated and dynamic approach to the study of how work and people are organized and puts the human at the centre of human resource management and organizational behaviour. The accessible student-centred focus and wide range of learning features makes the book an ideal course text for students at all levels. Combining a strong applied approach with a concise and jargon-free writing style, this book will help readers to understand underlying principles and apply them to their future careers as managers and HR practitioners. This textbook caters for undergraduate, postgraduate and MBA students studying modules that synthesise human resource management and organizational behaviour topics. It is also an ideal text for those studying any HRM module that takes an applied approach. Accompanying online resources for this title can be found at bloomsburyonlineresources.com/people-management-and-organizations. These resources are designed to support teaching and learning when using this textbook and are available at no extra cost.

Presenting an innovative concept and approach for organization management, this book serves to document an organization’s journey towards the ultimate goal of learning organization. This book also shares the experience on how a OL framework built on established learning theories, could be used effectively, overcoming many of the barriers in a real industrial setting. Utilizing a ready-to-use tool called Project Action Learning (PAL) to analyze real life case studies, the authors introduce a framework that allows teams of people to work and learn over the course of business projects. Equal emphasis is placed on the achievement of pre-set project outcomes and the learning objectives of the participants. In addition, a long term organizational learning strategy is put forward and the necessary supporting infrastructure, in the form of four ‘PAL Pillars’, is described. The concepts and development of the PAL driven Organizational Learning model are inspired by and grounded in, Western and Eastern business philosophies and case studies which offer important insights into the management of organizations who are keen to develop sustainable business practices.

Why do some organizations learn at faster rates than others? Why do organizations "forget"? Could productivity gains acquired in one part of an organization be transferred to another? Learning curves have been documented in many organizations, in both the manufacturing and service sectors. The classic learning curve model implies that organizational learning is cumulative and persists through time. However, recent work suggests that firms also demonstrate depreciation of knowledge, or "forgetting". Such understanding becomes more exciting as one looks at the link between learning and productivity. Organizational Learning: Creating, Retaining and Transferring Knowledge describes and integrates the results of research on factors explaining organizational learning curves and the persistence and transfer of productivity gains acquired through experience. Chapter One provides an overview of research on organizational learning curves. Chapter Two introduces the concept of organizational "forgetting" or knowledge depreciation. Chapter Three discusses the concept of organizational memory. Chapter Four argues that analyzing small groups provides understanding at a micro level of the social processes through which organizations create and combine knowledge. Chapter Five describes results on knowledge transfer. Chapter Six discusses various tensions and trade-offs in the organizational learning process.