Organizational Learning and Competitive Advantage

Abstract

Environmental turbulence in today's business landscape has elicited deep concerns in contemporary business organizations. As a result, organizations seek to achieve competitive advantage through organizational learning. This chapter presents organizational learning as a key source of competitive advantage in contemporary business organizations. It examines the concept of organizational learning by definition and delves in the four constituents that form the concept of organizational learning, namely knowledge acquisition, knowledge distribution, information interpretation, and organizational memory. Further, the chapter focuses on the factors affecting organizational learning together with competitive advantage as an outcome of organizational learning.

Organizational Learning and Corporate Social Responsibility Drivers of Performance in SMEs in Northwestern Mexico

“…The companies that enhance their learning that allows them to be more competitive, do so through efficiency in data processing and control of their information. In addition, various authors, such as Nonaka and Von Krogh [30], Argote, and Miron-Spektor [31] and Namada [32] have stated that organizations focused on organizational learning and in raising the knowledge of their human capital, increase their market opportunities, increase innovation and achieve greater economic results. In the literature there is a wide variety of models focused on the analysis and behavior of individual and organizational learning, which have become solid theories and of which the most prominent are as follows: 1) The spiral model of knowledge, based on the conversion of tacit knowledge into explicit [33].…”

Retentivity Beats prior Knowledge as Predictor for the Acquisition and Adaptation of New Production Processes

“…Cumming and Whorley [13] summarize the debate by defining it as a change process which enables an organization to acquire new knowledge through experience. These change processes can happen on three different levels: the individual, the group and the institutional level [14]. When it comes to the underlying processes, research shows that organizational learning and the underlying memory of a company resemble an individuals' learning process [15], and that a company learns and forgets through its members [16].…”

“…Thus, the individual learning processes play a major role in understanding organizational learning in general and one has to be accompanied by the other in order to fully understand the organizational learning process [21]. Individual learning consists of employees acquiring new knowledge and by applying it, fostering new skills, adopting new attitudes and consequently developing new competencies that are relevant for the company [14]. Taken together, organizational learning is a complex interplay between individual and institutional knowledge acquisition, skill development and the establishment of shared beliefs in order to initiate change processes [22].…”

Financial and Non-Financial Measures in Evaluating Performance: The Role of Strategic Intelligence in the Context of Commercial Banks in Kenya

“…On other hand, non-financial measures are incorporated in this paper since they play a big role during the formulation of long-term organisation strategies for customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is a strategic advantage and an inimitable firm resource (Mittal & Frennea, 2010), while continuous learning is a source of knowledge acquisition, distribution, information interpretation and organisation memory (Namada, 2018). On other hand review of internal processes provide continual evidence about the validity of the assumed firm's strategies (Kaplan & Norton, 2005).…”