مطالعه فرایند یادگیری سازمانی در شرکت های نرم افزاری در هند

This paper is based on the understanding that information technology is a knowledge intensive sector. In the globally competitive environment, firms are required to build firm specific competence. That could be achieved through ‘organisational learning’. This paper is an attempt to analyse the factors which are responsible for creating an environment for organisational learning in a firm. It is assumed that individuals are the basic units of learning and the knowledge gained by them gets institutionalised through a route of group processes. The individual/group learning is influenced by the policies and strategies of the firm as they get routinised and thus create a particular environment. Factor analysis with varimax rotation of the responses of employees from seven software firms on policies and strategies and on the group processes (teaming up) have been undertaken. The analysis identifies five factors to be responsible for making an environment for organisational learning. These are — organisational health, opportunities to learn, flexibility/risk taking, innovativeness and interaction. These factors and variables explained 63% of the variation in organisational learning. For the group processes, means the process of integration of individual knowledge, variables like challenge, variety at work, team activity and empowerment are found to play a significant role and they cover 66.8% variation. The empirical study revealed that the age of software firms is very small and the same is true of the work experience of young employees in those firms. Some level of satisfaction amongst employees is there towards the learning environment. However, ‘variety in the work’ and ‘empowerment’ issues in the group processes have been rated low by them. It can be interpreted that Indian software firms need to take more challenging tasks with better learning environments to build further competence in the sector.

The modern economy is experiencing radical changes in the structures and processes in the society. The society is on its way to globalisation of technologies and internationalisation of markets. Globalisation means besides other thing, knowledge intensive products. It also means that marketing and R&D are diffused more and more in global terms (Boekema et al., 2000). In this decentralised economic structure, the working conditions in the industry are fast changing. Some of the major transformations are: acceleration in the rate of learning, evolving new organisational structures, growing knowledge intensity of goods and services, strengthening of intellectual capital, technology fusion and the information technology (IT) (Chen, 1997, Millar et al., 1997 and Teece, 1998). All these changes highlight the role of knowledge in the firms competitiveness and economic progress (Bolisani and Scarso, 2000). The process of knowledge generation and its use is very dynamic and is changing at a rapid pace. As a result, the life of the processes and the products in the knowledge based companies/sectors is much shorter. It necessitates the firms to continuously update their knowledge so as to remain in the competitive market. The acquisition, interpretation and practicing of knowledge by an individual or an organisation is termed as learning, a step further to knowledge. Learning takes place by processing of information and it changes one's understanding (Friedlander, 1983) and leads to change in one's potential behaviour (Huber, 1991). It is the basic process demanded for the competence building in any enterprise. The IT sector is knowledge intensive and due to its extensive applications the world is heading towards a revolution in the business operations and in the lifestyle of society. Thus, in such a competitive phase, IT firms are expected to be aware of the issue of ‘organisational learning’. The organisational learning has been defined differently by different authors in the literature. According to Fiol & Lyles (1985), organisational learning refers to the development of insight and association of past actions, the effectiveness of those actions and future actions. Learning in an organisation depends on the ability to share common understanding (Deft & Weick, 1984). In simple language it is the capability of an organization to adapt to the changing environment (Hedberg, 1981). March (1991) has discussed the process of mutual learning where the individual learns about the organisation knowledge structure through socialization and organisation learns individual by adopting to individual beliefs and interpretations. The present paper is an attempt to explore the process of organisational learning built in the IT firms as perceived by its members. The following section is a review of the understanding of the concept of organisational learning, the knowledge generation and the process of learning in an organisation. The third section discusses the conceptual framework adopted for data collection and analysis. The subsequent sections describe the methodology and results of the empirical analysis and also given are the conclusions of the study on organisational learning in software companies.

The focus of the paper was to understand process of organisational learning in software companies. An important point that emerged from the sample is that the majority of respondents are young and have limited exposure to different types of organisations. This aspect makes the study more important because IT is the most popular discipline of young people from educational as well as the employment point of view. The focus of the paper was to explore the process of learning at the individual level which is the building block of the competence building of firms. This issue has been revealed through the level of satisfaction among young people in terms of learning. It helped in knowing whether software firms are in the process of competence building which is very much required to survive in the competitive world in the future. The factor analysis indicated that five factors are important for organisational learning and routines or policies of the software companies need to be built around them. The factors analysed are: organisational health, opportunities to learn, flexibility/risk taking, innovativeness and interactions, however, they explain 63% of the variation in overall perception of organisational learning. The satisfaction level of respondents was adequate for the first two factors — organisational health and opportunities to learn; it was average for flexibility/risk taking and innovativeness whereas for the fifth factor interaction, it was on the lower side. However, despite realising the immense potential of technology, it is noticed that the IT firms are somewhat sceptical in taking risks for providing flexibility to their members and thus creating a climate which acts as a barrier to innovation. The turnover rate in such firms was noticed to be higher. Employees must be looking outside for better remuneration or for more flexibility in an innovative organisation (learning organisation). Informal discussions with employees of some firms revealed that there was flexibility and freedom to work on new ideas in their respective organisations and in such organisations the turnover rate was also lower. Finally, interaction amongst colleagues was rated as low on the satisfaction score. It appears that the work environment within the organisation needs to be attended to as interaction provides opportunities to the members to share the new knowledge. It also helps in bringing closeness amongst colleagues and a sense of belongingness to the organisation. The Pearson correlation coefficients do not provide any appreciative picture of organisational functioning in the IT sector. The satisfaction level with the factor organisational health is perceived by the employees to be declining with the increase in service in the organisation. Their perception about innovativeness in the organisation goes down. The boom in the IT sector is a somewhat recent phenomenon and if organisations do not improve their environment and follow the path of innovativeness, the future of those firms may not be very bright. The data of the study supports the fact that opportunities to learn new things is quite high and if experienced people are given flexibility too, it would be good for the organisation. In the second part of the study, factor analysis has been applied to variables of importance for group processes. Group processes mean the immediate colleagues with whom they have to carry out their work. The four factors that emerged from the analysis are: challenge, variety at work, team activities and empowerment and they explain 66.8% of variation in group processes. Team activity and challenge are rated high and in relation to variety at work and empowerment, rated as average. On relating the above finding with the profile of individuals, it is found that with the increase in age and service in the organisation, the level of satisfaction with team spirit goes down. The learning process in any organisation begins from colleagues. If team spirit goes down, the learning rate would also go down. The reason for this could be that in an organisation, the scope for learning for an employee decreases due to less flexibility and less variety in the work assigned. In such a situation, an individual loses interest in sharing the gained knowledge too. This interpretation supports the prevailing trend in the software sector in India. The turnover rate in most of the firms is very high. People are leaving for USA or Europe. Most of the firms are in the service sector and have overseas clients. The tie-ups are such that many of the Indian firms are not getting much chance to explore for the innovative approach. They are executing the routine assignments. Personal communication revealed that some firms, though being in the service sector, are developing products too. In such firms, the turnover rate is lower and is related with the flexibility and variety at work in the organisation. Thus in India, for the software firms to have a sustaining and growing career in the competitive world, issues related to organisational learning need to be more carefully considered for competence building in the IT sector.