فرهنگ یادگیری سازمانی ـــ حلقه مفقود شده بین تغییر فرایند کسب و کار و عملکرد سازمانی

The aim of this paper is to present and test a model of organizational performance improvement based on the impact of organizational learning culture. The concept of organizational learning culture (OLC) is proposed and defined as a set of norms and values about the functioning of an organization. They should support systematic, in-depth approaches aimed at achieving higher-level organizational learning. The elements of an organizational learning process that we use are information acquisition, information interpretation, and behavioral and cognitive changes. Within the competing values framework OLC covers some aspects of all four different types of cultures: group, developmental, hierarchical, and rational. We use data from 203 Slovenian companies employing more than 50 people. The impact of OLC on organizational performance is empirically tested via structural equation modeling (SEM). The results show that OLC has a positive direct impact on all three aspects of non-financial performance included in the model: performance from the employee, customer, and supplier perspectives. The effect of organizational learning culture on financial performance is still positive, but indirect (through non-financial performance from the employee perspective).

Business and technological changes are threatening organizational sustainability and modern management faces many challenges (Drucker, 1999). Organizations are continually under competitive pressures and forced to re-evaluate their business models and underlying business processes. Operations management thus focuses on the careful management of internal processes along with processes in the supply chain, particularly by improving their efficiency and effectiveness, which are today needed more than ever. Yet, despite this, not enough attention has been paid to this topic (Hammer, 2004). The extensive literature on business process change (e.g. Davenport, 1993; Hammer and Champy, 1993; McCormack and Johnson, 2000; Burlton, 2001; Harmon, 2003) suggests that organizations can enhance their overall performance by adopting a process view of business. However, what is too often neglected is that most problems regarding business process management are not technical but arise from an inappropriate organizational culture that may impede innovations being implemented and superior performance being achieved (see e.g., Terziovski et al., 2003; Hammer, 2004). The basic idea behind this paper is that organizational culture is very important when trying to improve organizational performance by business process change. The paper addresses organizational learning culture, which is proposed and defined as a set of norms and values about the functioning of an organization. It is a combination of different culture types within the competing values framework (Denison and Spreitzer, 1991; McDermott, and Stock, 1999). The purpose of the paper is to present and test a model of organizational performance improvement. Hence, the focus of this study is on the impact organizational learning culture has on organizational performance. The outline of the paper is as follows: Section 2 reviews the relevant literature in order to demonstrate our specific contributions. Section 3 conceptualizes the research model leading to the development of suitable hypotheses. Section 4 aims to present a methodological framework for the study, while Section 5 provides results of data analysis. Section 6 concludes with a summary of the main findings, discusses them from theoretical and practical standpoints, and outlines directions for future research together with the limitations of the study.

Hypotheses 1 and 2 show that organizational learning is indeed a process in which information as a raw material is transformed into action. Organizations that value systematic approaches to organizational learning thus stress the importance of acquiring all types of information (operational, tactical and strategic) from both internal and external sources. The better a certain firms is at acquiring information the more understanding it can get from it. In other words, information acquisition positively effects information interpretation, which is nothing other than the ability to recognize entrepreneurial opportunities. Behavioral and cognitive changes mean transforming words into actions and seizing these opportunities, which wraps up the organizational learning cycle. Firms that attribute a high level of importance to the elements of this process integrate them into their set of norms and values and may be considered to have an OLC. The paper has shown that an OLC does have an impact on organizational performance. Specifically, we found that an OLC has a direct impact on all three studied elements of non-financial performance (Hypotheses 3–5). This effect is strongest when performance from the employee perspective is concerned. The effect of Fp was not direct (Hypothesis 6), but indirect and evident through employee performance (Hypothesis 7). Hypotheses 8 and 9 were not confirmed by the data. However, longitudinal observations might yield a deeper understanding in that respect. Effects that external stakeholders (e.g. customers and suppliers) have on the Fp of a company might be influenced by certain amount of time lag. This has important implications for managers striving for success. There is a substantial consensus today that a key competitive advantage of organizations lies in their ability to learn and to be responsive to challenges from both internal and external business environments. Clearly, more attention has to be paid to developing an organizational learning culture in order to improve organizational performance. This can be achieved by cultivating an environment in which the employees can and should continually learn and share their knowledge. One practical implication of this thinking is that investing effort, time and money into initiatives aimed at developing a learning-oriented culture can bring about improved performance—in terms of better relationships within and outside the company as well as in hard figures. Another relatively straightforward implication of these research findings is that employees are the most important stakeholder group in any business process change initiative that is striving for improved organizational performance. Disregarding whether the approach to change is evolutionary (TQM) or revolutionary (BPR), employees are the focal group for management's attention. Hence, managers striving for effectiveness and efficiency in their processes should put people first. Turning to the assumptions of the competing values model (Denison and Spreitzer, 1991), our research confirms that, in reality, firms are combinations of all four ideal types of cultures. It is true that in an organizational learning culture group and developmental cultures are predominant. Still, hierarchical and rational cultures are present to some extent. While a flexibility orientation is considered as offering responses to most challenges in the modern business environment this is not necessarily always so. Besides innovation and creativity and openness and commitment, firms need some structure, stability and continuity while not neglecting the fact that they also have to be accomplishment-oriented. The cross-sectional nature of the data gathered imposes the first methodological limitation—the inability to directly draw conclusions through a causal inference. Even though the structural equation models are conceptualized in a causal way, this technique needs to be backed up in advance with theoretical assumptions and previous research findings. For instance, in our case it might also be the case that superior organizational performance allows for the attainment of a higher-level organizational learning culture. For this reason, other research designs such as experimental and longitudinal ones are desirable when examining causal relationships among organizational variables (Egan et al., 2004). Such designs are extremely rare in this research context, whereas problems with data gathering (e.g. small overlaps of samples among different years, respondent non-disclosure, etc) occur on a regular basis. Nevertheless, Hult et al. (2002) did one similar study by conducting a longitudinal study of the learning climate on cycle times in supply chains. Every researcher and manager dealing with organizational culture and business process change needs to be aware of the multiplexity and multiple dimensions of organizational culture (Schein, 1992; Trompenaars and Woolliams, 2003). Further, the existence of different kinds of subcultures within organizations also needs to be accounted for. Besides, organizational culture is also heavily intertwined with national culture and other contextual variables (Hofstede, 1980), which will all need to be considered in future research. Case studies should also be performed to further validate our findings. This would yield a deeper understanding of the relationship of the constructs proposed in our model and serve to further test its applicability and usefulness from the practical point of view.