Organizational learning has emerged as a critical factor in allowing companies to achieve a competitive advantages. Motivation of this study on organizational learning is to identify how do companies learn and how they can improve their ability to learn!
Although many scholars have been interested in these issues, current knowledge on organizational learning is still very limited. Moreover, there is little agreement on organizational learning process. This study examines broader questions regarding organizational learning process, such as (1) whether organizational learning is associated with superior performance or not and (2) why some organizations learn more faster than others!
The main objectives of this study are as follows :
1) What are the relationships between influencing factors such as organizational structure, Information Technology(IT)-use, entrepreneurship, transformational leadership of CEO, and reward system and proficiencies at each stage of organizational learning process ?
2) what is the relationship between organizational learning process proficiency and technological capabilities as a measure of organizational performance ?
An empirical study was undertaken to test hypothesized relationship and data were collected from 43 private research institutes. Correlation analyses were employed to test hypotheses, and ANOVA were conducted for further analyses.
The major findings of this study were as follows :
1) Reward system, entrepreneurship and IT-use are significantly correlated with information dissemination process proficiency. Centrality of organization and charisma dimension in transformational leadership of CEO are significantly correlated with activity reflection process proficiency. Intellectual stimulation and individual consideration dimension in transformational leadership of CEO are significantly correlated with information utilization process proficiency. Formality of organizational structure and entrepreneurship are significantly correlated with organizational memorization process proficiency.
2) Information dissemination process proficiency, information utilization process proficiency, activity reflection process proficiency are significantly correlated with technological capabilities, which reflect the performance of research institutes.
3) Additional statistical analyses show that information utilization process proficiency is different among industries and among chaebuls(korean business conglomerate).
Human resource management, organizational climate, characteristics of organizational learning process in five Korean private research institutes were also described for the proliferation of organizational learning study.
Finally, some managerial implications and limitations of this study were described and future research directions were suggested.
