Abstract

Designing organizations with enhanced learning capability is a leitmotif of current approaches to organizational design and has implications for the way organizations are managed with respect to education, training, and development. The aim of this work is the identification of the factors and processes that can play a role in the design and operation of a "learning organization", and the critical evaluation of the strategies and policies proposed in the literature. After a review of the major streams of thought on the topic of organizational learning, the issue of how individual members' learning relates to organizational learning is addressed, using three basic units of analysis: individuals, groups/teams, and networks. The more significant processes underlying organizational learning are made explicit, in order to evaluate how strategies, practices, and design principles proposed in the literature map into the former. It is shown how most of the policies and strategies presented as "good practices" for learning organizations may actually precipitate counterproductive side effects if they are not adequately contextualized. It is argued that a canonical conception of a "learning organization" must include the use of observational and self-representational tools to continuously assess the status of individual, team and network learning processes, and a suggestion is that network analysis is an often overlooked tool that can offer much to this end.