Organizational Learning and its Practices

In the current world of business and organizations, the role of Organization learning is enormous as it is the learning ability and knowledge base of an organization which creates the distinctive competitive advantage. This paper reviews the literature on Organization learning. Organization theory, industrial economics, business history, management and innovation studies have all addressed the question of how do organizations learn. The paper assesses these various literatures and tires to understand the goals of organization learning, the learning process in organizations and some important variables on the concept of organization learning. In this paper, seven major variables or focus of the concept and practice of organization learning have been studied. It reviews the conceptual framework of individual and organizational learning and tries to understand how organizations learn from direct experience; learning from others; encouraging and creating a learning environment; and how do organizations develop conceptual frameworks for interpreting that experience. The idea of organization memory is also emphasized in this paper in order to show how organizations program information and retrieve it in spite of the turnover of personnel and the passage of time. The final section discusses the limitations as well as the possibilities of creating neiv paradigm on organizational learning in the current business environment.