Is the School a Learning Organization?

Abstract

The concept of an organization that learns “learning organization” is one of the most mentioned ideas in management, representing a subject of great interest for theorists in the field and for those involved in the functioning of organizations. The actuality of the topic consists in the fact that today learning has an important role within organizations. Learning and teamwork are highly encouraged in order to achieve common goals and to achieve the results that the members of the organizations really want. In contemporary times, society is in a continuous process of change. Under these conditions, the school must develop its ability to change to the new in order to face the challenges so that its role as a factor in the development of society becomes more and more obvious. Thus, permanent learning appeared as a reaction to the rapid transformations taking place in society, representing at the same time a necessity and a solution. The school is part of the category of organizations that learn, it being different from the others due to the specificity of the dominant activity, namely the instructive-educational process. In this article, we addressed the main characteristics existing in the specialized literature that define the learning organization, the school as a learning organization, as well as the identification of the existence of a possible relationship between the personal factors of teachers and the strategies that make the school a learning organization. The results illustrate the necesity of a correlation factors, such as function, teaching degree, seniority at work, with the strategies that make the school a learning organisation. In the table below we can see that the education level of the teaching staff is the only variable that does not correlate with the strategies that make a school a learning organisation.