Organizational Culture as the Glue between People and Organization: A Competence-based View on Learning and Competence Building

Abstract

ArticleOrganizational culture as the glue between people and organization: A competence-based view on learning and competence building Is organizational culture a catalyst of competence development? This paper argues it is. The reason for this is that organizational culture fosters the process of learning and competence building and works as a glue between people and the organization they belong to. We employ a most recently developed approach belonging to market process theory, the so-called 'competence-based theory of the firm', to explain these causal relationships.

Organizational Learning Culture, Consumer Satisfaction and Employee’s Attitude: Causality Analysis

“…In the context of an internal organization, the organizational learning culture serves as an adhesive between the individual and the organization in achieving common goals and presumably can increase the activity of learning and competence of member's organization (Freiling & Fichtner, 2010). Organizational culture is the "heart" of organization's human resources management strategy because of the effect on employee attitudes and outcomes such as retention, satisfaction, commitment, performance and other aspects (Harris & Mossholder, 1996).…”

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“…Employing the Crossan et al (1999) model of organizational learning it is possible to "model the feed forward and feedback processes of two different companies one by one". Such a modeling enables researchers to study the extended model of 4I (Freiling & Fichtner, 2010) …”

“…An organizational culture supporting learning strongly focuses on trust and interaction between employees, friendly relationships between co-workers, efficient communication that gives employees the feeling of being listened to as well as the feeling of belonging and worth. Such values emphasized by a firm enable it to create a healthy environment fostering creativity, cooperation and knowledge exchange (Isaken, Lauer, Ekvall & Britz, 2001;Vera & Crossan, 2004;Freiling & Fichtner, 2010). As highlighted by several researchers, employees' teams characterized by a high ability to cooperate among team members and a trust in each other, deliver a better performance compared with the teams lacking good interpersonal relationships (Davidson & James 2007;Rowe & Guerrero, 2011).…”

“…Such a fact should be considered as a limitation for the applied research framework 4 . However, this weakness is mitigated by the extended version of the model proposed by Freiling and Fichtner (2010) who point out that knowledge generated within an organization is supplemented with knowledge absorbed from the environment. In consequence, Freiling and Fichtner (2010, p. 161) add to the 4I model the process of absorbing knowledge which occurs at the level of individual learning and makes a bridge between intra-organizational learning and the absorptive capacity.…”

“…Having such leaders, employees are not afraid of sharing ideas even if they are not perfectly sure about them (Ekvall 1996;Goleman, Boyatzis & McKee, 2000;Isaken et. al, 2001, Freiling & Fichtner, 2010.…”