Culture and Organizational Learning: How Executive can be of Great Help?

Mostafa Sayyadi, Author, Transformational Leadership: How To Prosper as a Leader In Today's Hypercompetitive Environment

Culture and Organizational Learning: How Executive can be of Great Help?

Today‘s global business environments involve a high level of uncertainty and organizations will increasingly need more and better executives to manage them. Some executives may be more innovative and creative but some type of management is necessary to lead a global organization.

Collaboration is facilitated by less isolation and further dialogue. Executives can enhance interactions and dialogue to link subordinates’ individual-interests to collective-interests. In this way, executives can in fact contribute to enhancing collaboration that in turn develops relationships with subordinates. In addition, effective executives have been highlighted as important facilitators of trust-based relationships. Based on this, various authors argue that executives can engender trust, thereby showing concern for both organizations’ needs and followers’ interests at the same time. In particular, an executive focuses on identifying employees’ individual needs within companies. Executives also improve trust in order to enhance the commitment of their subordinates and mobilize their support toward organizational visions for changing the current situation. Furthermore, executives provide freedom for followers to investigate new ideas and knowledge. Accordingly, it is apparent that effective executives can develop learning climates. Importantly, executives propel learning culture that facilitates knowledge sharing and new idea generation within organizations. Following this approach, if an organization wants to have a culture oriented towards learning, then effective management is a very viable choice. In addition, through a review of the current literature, it is identified that the existing empirical studies have highlighted effective management as an important facilitator of learning culture

Moreover, knowledge is a product of interactions. Collaboration is a critical factor in developing access to knowledge. In fact, collaboration cultural enhances a shared understanding of the problems among employees, which is a necessary precursor to create new ideas and knowledge. In addition, effective executives have been highlighted as the enablers of trust-based relationships, and subsequently these trust-based relationships are ideal to share tacit knowledge among employees. Therefore, it seems reasonable to say that executives’ ability to create knowledge and develop a more innovative climate is a product of employees’ trust toward their leaders’ decisions. Several authors also argue that high trust environments could positively impact the tendencies of human assets to share their knowledge with others. Based on this view, it is quite understandable that both cultural dimensions of collaboration and trust facilitate knowledge and learning within organizations. Furthermore, embedding knowledge in organizational members is an important paradigm to support knowledge as the most strategic asset of organizations. Indeed, sharing the best practices and experiences (i.e. learning) could play a crucial role in embedding organizational knowledge in members and supporting this most strategic asset. Additionally, the knowledge-based view of the firm features the companies’ capabilities to create knowledge as an essential factor to develop competitive advantage. Herein, learning has been highlighted as a precursor for knowledge creation, and subsequently argued that the amount of time spent learning is positively related with the amount of knowledge. Therefore, firms stressing organizational culture are stronger in creating new knowledge, and also transferring knowledge around the organization.

In conclusion, the question posited for executives in any and all organizations is to accept the challenge of effective management in order to address the current gaps and improve organizational learning and competitiveness in global markets.