Answer To: Discuss any five (5) key barriers to organisational learning in organisations in your home country....
Parul answered on Oct 19 2021
Organisation Learning
In this competitive world it is imperative for organisation to evolve with the market in order to be relevant. Indeed, learning is new fuel for success of any business. Organisation learning is the process of designing, retaining and transferring knowledge within the organisation. For instance, staying updated with skills can help enhance the productivity. An organisation enhances over time since it is able gain knowledge and experience from the learnings over the period of time (Moingeon and Edmondson, 1996). It has provided the business with the immense power to communicate with its employees, associates and customers 24*7. In fact, the business can be in constant touch with all its concerned stakeholders and minimise miscommunications and eliminate gaps. Secondly with internet business can reach to wider audience with just a click of the button. For example, Amazon which was initially only an online book store competing with Barnes & Nobel. Twenty year down line Amazon has transformed itself into massive online marketplace which is extremely popular to buy anything in the world while Barnes & Nobel is on the verge of extinction. By the virtue of organisation learning it has completely changed due to manifestation of digital marketing (McHugh, Groves and Alker, 1998). Essentially, organisation learning implies intentional use of new insights that are gained from new knowledge in order to foster continuous improvement, innovative culture to develop new solutions and enhance service of organisation.
Barriers to Organisational Learning
Any person in a leadership role has to witness some of the major hindrance in the organisation that doesn’t promote the culture of learning and foster an environment where transfer of knowledge takes place (McHugh, Groves and Alker, 1998). Organisation learning may be considered as a domain that just demand cost and have no concrete return. However, in reality nothing could be farthest from this. Essentially the truth is, irrespective of how good one is at the job, there is always a role of improvement. If one doesn’t learn from failures or advances the knowledge with market then it is doomed to become obsolete and irrelevant in future. Following are the barriers to organisational learning. Many of us are aware of this fact yet few will argue that in many organisations learning and development lacks drive and is sub-optimal in nature. That is why they provide little or no value to the employees as well as organisations.
There are five primary barriers to the organisation learning mentioned below
1. Resistance and Stubbornness towards Change
2. Lack of Drive and Support from Leadership
3. Team Success and Collaboration isn’t Rewarded or Recognized
4. Myopic Focus
5. Micromanagement
Resistance and Stubbornness towards Change
It is one of the most common as well as major barrier in order to create learning organisation. Essentially, employees who become too comfortable with their job or are working in same place for long time resist to change their behaviour and ways of working as per the new trends in the market. These employees have fixed mindset approach not only towards their work but also their personal development (Senge, P. M., 1990). People with fixed mindset believe intelligence can’t be changed this leads to the desire to look smart in order to avoid challenges. They don’t want to look bad if they fail which hold them back to take any new challenge or even change voluntarily. In the face of obstacles, they get defensive and give up easily. They see effort to be pointless and believes that people are only great at things because they were born that way. When confronted with constructive criticism they ignore them and lastly, they feel threatened by the success of others. People with fixed mindset achieve much less than they are capable of.
Essentially, this is underlying reasons why large-scale organisations finds it difficult to promote organisation learning. Moreover, instead of promoting learning the culture becomes more bureaucratic since they have employees who are quite old working in the organisation as well as they feel as if there is only one way to perform their job. Such fixed mindset is inevitable and we all are susceptible to that hence this barrier can even bolster itself further.
Lack of Drive and Support from Leadership
Leadership forms the backbone of any organisation and one of the major differentiators that makes a company good to great. Many leaders ignore the fact that learning is a process that reaps its fruits in future instead of instant gratifications. Organisation is sometimes plagued with leaders who questions the sanctity of learning on the grounds of cost and tangible returns. Furthermore, there are certain leaders who follow only one type of leadership style like authoritative or too transactional, that avoids confrontations, healthy discussions, asking tough questions and thinking out of the box. Such leadership can bread fixed mindset in the employees and curb creativity...