فرهنگ یادگیری سازمانی، فرهنگ نوآورانه و نوآوری در شرکت های کره جنوبی

The aim of this paper is to present and test a model of innovativeness improvement based on the impact of organizational learning culture. The concept of organizational learning culture (OLC) is presented 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. Constructs comprising innovativeness are innovative culture and innovations, which are made of technical (product and service) and administrative (process) innovations. We use data from 201 Korean companies employing more than 50 people. The impact of OLC on innovations empirically tested via structural equation modeling (SEM). The results show that OLC has a very strong positive direct effect on innovations as well as moderate positive indirect impact via innovative culture.

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 come up with new innovations. An innovation can be a new product or service, a new production technology, a new operation procedure or a new management strategy to an enterprise (Damanpour, 1991, Liao et al., 2008, Nonaka and Yamanouchi, 1989, Tushman and Nadler, 1986 and Zaltman et al., 1973). Innovations have always been essential for the organizations’ long-term survival and growth and currently play even more crucial role in the company’s future to follow the rapid pace of markets’ evolution (Santos-Vijande & Álvarez-González, 2007). In the literature innovations are differentiated as product vs. process (Abernathy and Utterback, 1978, Davenport, 1993 and Han et al., 1998), radical vs. incremental (Atuahene Gima, 1996 and March, 1991), and technical vs. administrative (Daft, 1978, Damanpour et al., 1989, Han et al., 1998 and Weerawardena, 2003). Moreover, a true innovative firm must be embedded of a strong culture that stimulates the engagement in innovative behavior. Innovativeness is hence comprised of two constructs – innovations and innovative culture. The body of literature that has studied the relation between organizational learning and innovation is growing and suggests that organizational learning would enhance the innovative capacity of an organization and that firms can only innovate if they develop an efficient learning of their resources, competencies and capabilities (Akgün et al., 2007, Alegre and Chiva, 2008, Argyris and Schön, 1978, Calantone et al., 2002, Chipika and Willson, 2006, Helfat and Raubitscheck, 2000, Sinkula et al., 1997 and Stata, 1989). Similarly, studies increasingly stress organizational culture as a key to managing innovation (e.g. Jassawalla and Sashittal, 2002 and Khazanchi et al., 2007). Yet, there is a lack of investigation of the relation of organizational learning culture and innovativeness. What is too often neglected is not just knowledge needed, acquired and processed, but rather a right set of attitudes and values needed for innovations to occur (see e.g. Terziovski, 2008). The basic idea behind this paper is that organizational learning culture is very important when trying to improve innovativeness. 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 and McDermott and Stock, 1999). The purpose of the paper is to present and test a model of innovativeness improvement. Hence, the focus of this study is on the impact organizational learning culture has on innovativeness (innovative culture and innovations). 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 organizational learning culture (Škerlavaj et al., 2007). The paper has shown that an organizational learning culture does have an impact on innovativeness. Specifically, we found that an organizational learning culture has a direct impact on technical and administrative innovations (Hypothesis 5). Organizational learning culture also has moderate indirect positive effect on innovations via innovative culture (Hypotheses 3 and 4). Each of these findings might help to illuminate the effectiveness and efficiency of the organizational learning culture’s application to workplace innovation in Korean companies that are facing unpredictable global and economical challenges. Heo (2008) argued that organizational learning culture depends on the acquisition of information, the interpretation of information, and the creation of organizational knowledge. In other words, the learning culture can result in maximizing the capability of innovation in a high performance organization. Furthermore, according to Chang (2008), firm’s innovation was significantly accounted by organizational learning culture and positively influenced by the interaction between the type of organizational learning and environmental uncertainty. The result of this research could provide acceptable rationales and enhance the reliability of current research. This study has major managerial implications. 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 (Škerlavaj et al., 2007). Clearly, more attention has to be paid to developing an organizational learning culture in order to improve organizational innovativeness. 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 augmented innovativeness within modern organizations. Korea is no exception to this finding. Since the severe economic crisis in 1997, most of Korean organizations have more focused on the organizational innovation in terms of structural innovation, process innovation, and so on (Lim & Kah, 2004). This research would provide theoretically acceptable, which is also practically applicable, flow-map for building strategic organizational innovation-related initiatives for Korean (and other) organizations. The focus of learning-oriented culture in organizational innovation must meet the dynamic requirements of the workplace, some of which cannot be anticipated. Thus the organizational learning culture must be flexible in that it entertains further changes in workplace demands, that learning support is updated in a timely manner, and that it helps employees in organization adapt themselves in substantial change of external environment. New principles introduced in the organizational learning culture should be conditioned with advisement that they might be superseded in the future by the unanticipated changes in workplace demands. Employees in flexible organizational leaning culture should be advised that changes in economic, political, and corporate structures could significantly alter the way of innovation in the workplace and might be required to change the fundamental process by which work is done and prepare for a new career. In terms of implications for researchers, turning to the assumptions of the competing values model (Denison & Spreitzer, 1991), our research confirms findings from Škerlavaj et al. (2007). That is, 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 innovativeness backs up 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, Ketchen, and Slater (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 and 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. In addition, based on the primary objective of the current research, complicated organizational behavior-related interactions could be more accurately captured through in depth-observation of the phenomenon in the workplace. In future research, longitudinal studies with a more qualitative-oriented approach using in-depth case studies are recommended. 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.