MSG Team's other articles

11330 Impact of Social Networking Sites on Social Capital

Online social networking sites (SNS) are basically the gatherings of individuals who share similar interests. Online communities like: Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Bring together like-minded people and establish contact between them by providing information about each individual. It is evident that exponential growth of internet users has resulted in increased interactions among individuals on social […]

12052 Workplace Health and Safety

Statistics show that every twenty seconds of every working minute throughout the world, someone dies as a result of industrial accident or poor safety conditions at workplace. Thousands of employees throughout the world lose their limbs, suffer from temporary or permanent disability or lose their lives due to insufficient arrangements for their health and safety […]

9150 Employee Relations – Importance and Ways of Improving Employee Relations

Maintaining healthy employee relations in an organization is a pre-requisite for organizational success. Strong employee relations are required for high productivity and human satisfaction. Employee relations generally deal with avoiding and resolving issues concerning individuals which might arise out of or influence the work scenario. Strong employee relation depends upon healthy and safe work environment, […]

11312 Principles of Social Business

The idea of social business was given by Prof. Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh. It was unique because unlike other concepts or businesses that were serving the society for namesake, social business was based on certain principles. These principles are seven in number and are called the principles of social business. Like any other principle, the […]

11483 Talent Management and Poaching Talent

What could be the biggest source of competitive advantage to an organization in the current era of cut throat competition? If I asked this question a decade or two decade, the answer would have been something like – ‘it’s the technology’, ‘its global presence’, ‘its customer perception’ etc. All of them can be a potential […]

Search with tags

  • No tags available.

The Link between Organizational Learning and Productivity

Learning organizations are productive organizations. When employees acquire knowledge, they learn to actualize efficient and productive ways of working. When they share the knowledge acquired thus, they tend to ensure that other employees are productive as well.

When the entire team collaborates and works together, they leverage the synergies from teamwork and actualize efficiencies from scale and the economies of collaboration.

Indeed, the term “Reinventing the Wheel” is used to describe those organizations where employees often do the same repetitive iterations of work without learning from past cycles whereas in learning organizations, employees simply can refer to the learning and the insights of others who have done similar work before and apply them accordingly to ensure that each iteration or cycle of work does not reinvent the wheel.

Instead, they build on the strengths of others or in other words, “stand on the shoulders of giants” and become taller in the process.

This is the reason why reputed certification institutes such as SEI or the Software Engineering Institute have a CMM or Capability Maturity Model which rank organizations on how mature their processes are and in turn, these rankings indicate how much learning has taken place and how it can apply to successive iterations.

The VUCA Paradigm and the Challenges of Organizational Learning

Having said that, building learning organizations is not that easy in volatile and uncertain times where ambiguity and complexity are the norm rather than the exception.

Indeed, the VUCA Paradigm so-called for its description of the external landscape as Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous captures the difficulties and the challenges faced by organizations to actualize a learning workplace.

To explain, middle and senior managers find it challenging to manage the stress and the chaos caused by these factors and in turn, do not devote their energies in teamwork and collaboration.

Moreover, as one journal puts it, “The greater the mess, the higher the stress” which means that in organizations that do not learn to deal with the VUCA factors, there is always a certain scramble for doing things in an Ad Hoc manner without any structure or order or what is also known as a “Method in the Madness”.

Thus, this means that organizations necessarily have to invest in building organizational learning wherein there is horizontal and vertical learning and more importantly, there is sharing of knowledge across the board instead of hoarding it.

Knowledge Hoarding and Why Internal Competition Should be Managed

Talking about hoarding of knowledge, one common scourge of even the best learning organization is that some employees who are often the highest performers often keep the knowledge acquired by them for their own progress rather than putting it in the public domain or sharing it with others.

Indeed, as one HBR or Harvard Business Review author puts it, this is the result of competition between the team members wherein organizations that incentivized high knowledge acquirers and place a premium on competitive appraisals often find that taken as a whole, the organization loses.

In other words, when the performance review system is skewed and biased toward ensuring competition rather than collaboration, there is a tendency towards synergies and efficiencies being lost in the process.

On the other hand, in learning organizations, there is a greater emphasis on sharing of knowledge and collaborative team work those results in higher productivity for the organization as a whole.

Thus, it is clear that the choice between organizational productivity and individual productivity need not be binary and instead, organizations can put in place strategies where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Indeed, in these brutally competitive times, such binary choices should be shunned and while external competition must be encouraged, there is absolutely no reason for internal attrition due to competition for knowledge.

The Knowing Doing Gap

Having said that, it is also the case that simple knowledge acquisition and sharing serve the purpose as there is something called the Knowing – Doing Gap. This term describes organizations where everyone knows what needs to be done but they do not act in reality.

This happens mainly because of complacency as well as organizational inertia wherein time spent in knowledge sharing and learning meetings is often all Talk and No Work or in other words, such meetings are merely Talk Fests without any follow up for the outcomes.

In a book that first coined this term, the authors speak about how some organizations are adept at converting knowing into doing whereas others are neither knowing nor doing or in the middle, they are knowing but not doing. The solution for this conundrum lies in the way the organization approaches the practice of learning.

For instance, feedback about the knowledge learning and sharing and surveys that capture the metrics of how much such learning processes have contributed to actual doing or implementation can go a long way in bridging the Knowing – Doing Gap.

Lastly, in times when there is abundance of knowledge due to the internet, it is fairly easy for anyone to access such knowledge.

However, the trick or the key to success for organizations hinges on determining how relevant such knowledge is and how it can be embedded into the organizational learning processes.

In other words, while you and I can indeed become knowledgeable due to the internet, when we are working in an organization, how much useful that knowledge is, who has the more knowledge, and who can share effectively, and lastly, how much of that knowledge that we are putting into practical work is very important.

Article Written by

MSG Team

An insightful writer passionate about sharing expertise, trends, and tips, dedicated to inspiring and informing readers through engaging and thoughtful content.

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Articles

Benefits of Healthy Work Life Balance

MSG Team

Is a Four Day Workweek the Answer to the Epidemic Of Stress And Burnout?

MSG Team