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...management towards creating and maintaining organisational learning.
Keywords: Emotional Intelligence; Organisational Learning
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An organisation learns when its individual employee learns, but learning by the individual employee does not guarantee organisational learning. For organisational learning to be a reality, the learning at the individual level has to progress to the group and finally to the organisational level. Further, organisational learning requires not only vertical integration of more than one individual learning entities, but also of its horizontal integration with other learning entities that exist side-by-side to it in the organisational cosmos. To achieve it, the human capital of the organisation may even go too far by challenging and demolishing the age old established premises and creating a vibrant and functional one in its place. Therefore, looking at the nature of mental exercise and psychic energy used while organisational members learn together, it is not only the cognitive brain but also the emotional brain that has role to play.
Further, for organisational learning to be in full swing, there is a great deal of convergent as well as divergent thinking, which is full of agony and ecstasy for organisational members. Therefore, the key to successful management is management of destructive emotions. Hence, the author believes that organisational learning can be realised successfully when the human resources are able to develop needed emotional competencies. Once this is done then it is quite possible for them to make maximum use of their mental energy to engage into the thinking mode which is more system oriented. In other words, the construct of emotional intelligence and its competencies are believed to play a relatively dominant role for learning at the individual level to reach an organisational level. This study is an attempt to understand the role of emotional intelligence of the human resources on the processes of organisational learning.
Organisational Learning: A Prerogative in the Present Millennium
The present millennium has rightly been perceived to be a new era in the evolution of organisational life and structure. As a result, organisations are forced to make significant transformations in order to adapt and survive in this new world. Revans (1983) says that in any epoch of rapid change, those organisations which are unable to adapt will soon find themselves in trouble, and adaptation is achieved only by learning, namely, by being able to do tomorrow that which might have been unnecessary today. Similarly, Zuboff (1988) observes that today's organisations may indeed have little choice but to become a 'learning institution'. Further, she adds that learning is the heart of productive activity in every organisation and learning is the new form of labour. Therefore, it may be said that today's solutions will be totally inadequate for tomorrow's challenges when the main focus of each organisation is on the 'customer' and not on 'workers', in an economy which has shifted from being 'national' to 'global'.
In this context, the only competitive weapon for organisations is 'learning at an organisational level'. It calls for the organisation to mobilise every resource to facilitate learning at an individual level to move up the ladder to the group and then to the organisational level. Therefore, for an organisation to survive and grow, it has to let all its members from the lowest rung to the top-most level to learn as one entity rather than the other way round. Hence, companies that do not become learning organisations will soon go the way of the dinosaur because they are unable to adjust quickly enough to the changing environment (Schwandt and Marquardt, 2000). Owen (1991) says that it is not that profit and product are no longer important for organisations, but without continual learning, profits and products will no longer be possible. Therefore, the business of business is learning and all else will follow. According to Dilworth (1998), "change now tends to outdistance our ability to learn and it is only by improving the learning capacity of organisations can we deal with change dynamics".
What is Organisational Learning?
The concept of organisational learning has been widely espoused. The general consensus that if organisations were to change and innovate, organisational learning has had to be addressed. Argyris and Schon's (1978) conceptualisation of double-loop and deutero learning succinctly explains what organisational learning is about.
Huber (1991) believes that organisational learning consists of four major constructs: knowledge acquisition, information distribution, information interpretation, and organisational memory. His views have been basically synthesised towards interactive systems within the organisational learning construct. Just as with individuals, organisations must always confront the novel aspect of their circumstances (Cohen and Sproull, 1991). Learning consists of two kinds of activities. The first kind of learning is obtaining know-how in order to solve specific problems based upon existing premises. The second kind of learning is establishing new premises that is, paradigms, schemata, mental models, or perspectives to override the existing ones (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). These two kinds of learning have been referred to as "Learning I" and "Learning II" (Bateson, 1973) or "Single-Loop Learning" and "Double-Loop Learning" (Argyris and Schon, 1978) or "Adaptive Learning" and "Generative Learning" (Senge, 1990).
Organisational learning begins with double-loop learning. Most organisations tend to do well with single-loop learning but very few are effective at double-loop and deutro-learning (Dodgson, 1993). Organisational learning is 'learning by a social system' that pursues the creation of social capital (Probost and Buchel, 1997). Such kind of learning occurs when members of the organisation act as learning agents for the organisation, responding to changes in the internal and external environments of the organisation by detecting and correcting errors in organisational theory-in-use and embedding the results of their inquiry in private images and shared maps of organisation (Argyris and Schon, 1978).
Linkage between Individual and Organisational Learning
Although organisational learning is dependent on individuals, not all learning at the individual level translates into learning at the organisational level. Organisational learning is not merely the aggregate of the learning of the organisation's members (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990; Dodgson, 1993; Watkins and Marsick, 1993). Organisational learning takes place when the lessons that are salient to the interests and problems of members are learned at one point in the organisation and are then stored and diffused to others in the organisation. This, then, leads to actions that are directed towards rectifying discrepancies in the organisation (Othman and Hashim, 2004). The construct of organisational learning is independent of any specific individual. Therefore, although the leader in a large organisation may change over time, the way in which an organisation learns or fails to learn has...
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