This is a case study, within the field of Education and Human Resource Development. The subject is handover in a non-profit organization. The organization studied is the Uppsala Student Union (US). US is a politically run Non-profit organization (NGO), with the objective to work for better study- and living conditions of the 35 000 students at Uppsala University, Sweden, who are its members. Four people active within US have been interviewed, and the empiric material has been analyzed mainly based on the theories of Organizational Learning and Continuity Management. Some other theories are presented as well, as an orientation with relation to handover in organizations and organizational development. The questions asked are: 1. How is transfer of knowledge perceived in US – as a significant problem, a small problem or no problem at all? 2. If transfer of knowledge is perceived as a problem, what are thought to be the causes? 3. In US, as a NGO, how is handover managed? Which problems arise with respect to handover? 4. What else of interest and relevance can be found? The answers are: 1. A small problem. Transfer of knowledge is much thought of, but there are problems which are viewed as more important. 2. The causes for problems with handover are mainly referred to a heavy workload for the actives, high turnover and insufficient handover routines. 3. Routines for handover is a well integrated part of the work at US. And the conditions in terms of resources are good compared to other student unions. Some problems still arise, and a selection of these are presented in the study. 4. Additional findings have been defined under the following headlines: Representation on Boards – an area for improvement Changing the roles On Actives-mentality (Swe. föreningsmänniskor) Effective policy making Students as actives

Evidence-based practice (EBP) is recognized as a means for providing safe, cost-effective, and quality healthcare. Registered Nurses (RNs), like other disciplines, are accountable for providing patient care based on the best evidence. The greatest majority of RNs are employed within the acute care setting. Unknown is what type of organizational infrastructure is necessary to support RNs in EBP. The business community reports positive performance outcomes through development of learning organizations (LO). LOs are reputed to be high functioning, supportive, adaptive, and continuously learning systems, compatible with the needs reflected in today's complex, turbulent healthcare. This descriptive study used a survey methodology to identify relationships between the dimensions of a LO as perceived by RNs within the context of the acute care hospital and their beliefs about and implementation of EBP. Six hospitals, two magnet designated, two non-magnet, and two Veterans Administration Medical Centers in one southwestern state were invited to participate. Three established instruments were used. Distribution of questionnaires to 1750 RNs resulted in a return of 592, for a 34% response rate. Instruments demonstrated adequate reliability and validity for this sample. Psychometrics on the EBP Beliefs Scale resulted in the identification of four subscales that were subsequently included in the analyses. Descriptive statistics indicated differences in characteristics of nurses from the different types organizations. The VA nurse's average age was 48 years, worked 19 years as an RN and 64% reported their highest educational degree as bachelor or above. Nurses responding from the other two types of organizations, on the average, were 42 years old, had 14 years experience, and 52% reported an educational degree of bachelor or above. Relationships were identified between RNs' perceived beliefs about EBP and their reported frequency of EBP implementation. Regressing beliefs on the dependent variable of implementation with the full sample (n=543) resulted in R2=.23, p<.05. Slight variation was noted in the analysis per organizational type. Relationships among the dimensions of the learning organization and the subscales of the Belief scale were analyzed using regression analysis. Significant relationships were noted but were demonstrated differently among the three different types of organizations.

Learning has to go on constantly and has to be the aim of existence for each person. These changes such as a challenge for educational and training system make us to change the educational system according to the concept of a learning society (Chapman, 1996). This is the topicality of the researched area. The idea of the research is that the author has used the theoretical basis of B. Simonaitiene dissertation and the indicators of a learning educational organization and a part of the survey instrument presented by the author of the dissertation. However, the author of this research has changed the geography of the research grip (Siauliai city). Hopefully, the situation of gymnasiums as learning organizations can potentially be characterized as peculiar that was quite meaningful to research. The problematic question of the research is what characteristics of learning organizations are present in Siauliai gymnasiums. The research object is a learning organization. The research point is educational institution as a learning organization. The research hypothesis is that socio-demographic variables influence the teacher point of view towards the occurrence of characteristics of a learning organization. The research aim is to empirically research the occurrence of learning organization peculiarities in Siauliai gymnasiums. The research objectives are to identify the peculiarities of a learning organization in educational institutions, to present the indicators and activity... [to full text]

Två gånger per år genomförs kompetensinvesteringar för ingenjörer på GKN Aerospace Sweden AB. Konceptet går under benämningen Training Days. Syftet med investeringen är att höja kompetensen bland de ca 400 ingenjörerna. I anslutning till utbildningsdagarna genomförs en enkätundersökning för att se till deltagarnas åsikter om Training Days. Problemet är att det aldrig undersökt vilken inställning och synsätt medarbetarna har till lärande och utveckling och om de olika perspektiven i sådana fall påverkar effekterna av investeringarna. Den kvalitativa fallstudien syftar till att undersöka om ingenjörernas perspektiv på lärande och kompetens påverkar organisationens utveckling. Materialet har insamlats med kvalitativa intervjuer som analyserats i förhållande till teori och aktuell forskning. Dessutom har det undersökts om det finns ett gemensamt perspektiv på kompetensutveckling som kan utveckla Training Days och effekterna av utbildningsdagarna. Fallstudien kan ses som ett kompletterande verktyg till GKN:s interna enkät. Teorin menar att det är viktigt att skapa ett systemtänkande och att individer behöver se till sitt eget personliga mästerskap för att få en helhetsförståelse, och därigenom höja den individuella och gemensamma kompetensen. Majoriteten av respondenterna i studien anser att de inte får någon praktisk kompetens genom utbildningsdagarna, de menar snarare att konceptet bidrar till nya infallsvinklar. Resultatet av denna studie bygger på tolkning av det insamlade empiriska materialet, med stöd av teorin visar att det finns både olika synsätt och inställning till lärande och utveckling bland ingenjörerna vilket påverkar utvecklingsprocessen. På GKN finns alla förutsättningar för att lyckas med kompetensutveckling, men när inställning till lärande och utveckling är individuell påverkar det alla led i lärandeprocessen / Twice a year GKN Aerospace Sweden AB implements skills investment for their engineers. The concept is known as Training Days. The purpose of investment is to improve the skills of about 400 engineers. Adjacent to the Training Days there is a implemented survey to see what the engineers think about the concept. The problem is that the survey doesn't examine the attitude and the approach employees have about learning and development, and on the various perspectives, in such cases the affect of the impact of the investments. This qualitative case study aims to examine the engineer's perspective on learning and skills, and it´s effect on the organization's development. The material has been collected by qualitative interviews, analyzed in relation to theory and current research. Moreover, it has been investigated whether there is a common perspective on skills that can develop Training Days and the effects of training days. The case study can be seen as a complementary tool to GKN's internal poll. The theory says that it is important to create a systems approach and that the individuals need to make their own personal "championship", to get an overall understanding, and thereby raising individual and collective skills. The majority of the respondents in this study believe that they do not receive any practical skills through Training Days. They mean rather that the concept contributes to new approaches. The results of this study are based on the interpretation of the collected empirical material, supported by theory. The outcome shows that there are both different approaches and attitudes to learning and development among the engineers, which affects the development process. GKN have all prerequisites for the skills development to succeed. But the approach to learning and development is individual, so it affects all elements in the learning process

Bakgrund: Sveriges vård och omsorg har sviktat de senaste åren vilket har gjort att frågan om vilken vårdleverantör en kund ska välja uppmärksammats. Det finns olika faktorer som har en inverkan på kundens val, bland annat förtroende och kvaliteten för tjänsten. Där kommer valet mellan offentlig och privat vård in. Därigenom har frågan om vinst i välfärden lyfts, och vad som egentligen är skillnaden mellan privat och offentlig vård och omsorg. Kvalitetsarbetet blir således det som ger förtroendet för vården. För att kunna utveckla den kvaliteten som kunden efterfrågar behöver ett lärande finnas i verksamheten. Utan lärande kan inte kvalitetsarbetet utvecklas och det sviktande förtroendet för vården återstår. Syfte: Syftet med uppsatsen ämnar undersöka begreppet kvalitetsarbete och hur privata samt offentliga aktörer inom vård och omsorg arbetar med fenomenet. Studien vill uppnå en ökad förståelse för hur kvalitetsutveckling bedrivs inom olika verksamheter. Studien har för avsikt att jämföra den privata vård- och omsorgssektorn med den offentliga för att få en så stor överblick och insikt i ämnet som möjligt. Teoretisk referensram: Föreliggande studie använder teorier och begrepp som exempelvis new public management, kaizen och lärande organisationer. Kärnbegreppen som studien bygger på är ständiga förbättringar, vilket kommer från kaizen, och organisatorisk lärande. Dessa utgör kvalitetsarbetet i en verksamhet och är därav sammankopplade. Dessa teorier kommer att stöjda studiens undersökning av skillnaderna mellan privat och offentlig verksamhet. Metod: Studien använde en kvalitativ forskningsansats, där semistrukturerade intervjuer utgjorde den huvudsakliga datainsamlingen och kompletterades med en dokumentanalys. Studien undersökte två fallstudieorganisationer, vilket gjorde att en triangulering utfördes. Slutsats: Det studien indikerade var att privata verksamheter känner en stark press för att både leverera till sina aktieägare och till sina kunder, vilket blir en paradox där vinstmaximering och god service möts. Offentliga verksamheter har en automatisk tillgång till brukare vilket gör att de inte känner samma påtryckningar. Generellt indikerade studien att kvalitetsarbetet inom organisationerna var liknande, det som skiljde sig kom framförallt ifrån skillnader inom arbetssätten. Privata verksamheter arbetar mer med att skapa konkurrenskraftiga tjänster, där lärande och konkurrenskraft kan kopplas samman. Det kan i sin tur härledas till att offentliga verksamheter inte känner samma press att arbeta konkurrenskraftigt.

Knowledge is one of the most important assets of an organization that directly affects business success, and its importance increases for organizations that use knowledge-intensive processes such as the software development industry. In an industry in which technological developments are rapid, in order to keep up with the continuously increasing competition and to obtain competitive advantage the software organizations need to obtain the correct knowledge, use it efficiently and pass it to future projects evolving it accordingly. The major aim of this research is to propose a novel model, namely AiOLoS, for assessing the level of organizational learning and learning characteristics in software development organizations. The primary contributions of this two-legged AiOLoS model are the identification of the major process areas and the core processes that a learning software organization follows during its organizational learning process and to provide the necessary measures and metrics and the corresponding definitions/interpretations for the assessment of the learning characteristics of the software development organization. The research is supported with a multiple case-study work conducted in software development teams in order to identify the mapping of the core processes and the applicability of the AiOLoS model to software development organizations, its utilization as a tool for assessing organizational learning and providing a basis for software process improvement.

The purpose of this study is from a teacher’s perspective to examine how schoolteachers experience the possibilities of learning from each other within their work team and to shed some light on how teachers believe that cooperation affects their ability to learn and improve on a daily basis. My research questions are: What is the general discussion among the teachers concerning daily capacity building from enhanced teamwork? How important is well-functioning cooperation between co-workers for learning and daily capacity building? What are the prerequisites for a well-functioning learning situation within the work team? The study is based on five qualitative interviews with teachers within the same school but from different teaching backgrounds based on what grade they teach, what subjects they teach, and they belong to different work teams within the school. The interviews are semi-structured. The results have been analysed from a perspective based on the theories of organisational pedagogy and learning organisations.The results implies that the work teams does not function as a forum for exchanging experiences and learning from each other. Cooperation does, however, exist within the work teams and it has positive effects on other work related aspects, but not on individual daily capacity building. The teams are primarily used for exchange concerning more common and practical issues. This seems to be the situation due to lack of time, priority and structure. The teachers in my study believes that the work team is a vital and important part of their everyday work and it is a forum they wish to exist even if the teams are not today working as wanted when concerning capacity building. The use and functioning of the work teams at the school for this study should be carefully evaluated and improved if the work teams should also function as an effective tool for daily capacity building for the teachers.

There has been a growing prevalent interest to explore the role of knowledge in organizations. Bhardwaj and Monin (2006) identified the knowledge of individuals' as a valuable source of competitive advantage. An organizations well-rounded institutional memory- the organizations collective experiences (Rothwell & Poduch, 2004), fosters competitive advantage. There is a prevailing need to scrutinize the role of tacit knowledge in organizations and how it's hard to articulate nature makes it difficult for organizations to acquire and preserve institutional memory value. The aim of this review is to illustrate that tacit knowledge contributes significantly to the institutional memory value, expansion and preservation. In an effort to simplify this relationship between tacit knowledge and institutional memory, a comprehensive literature search was performed. I first discuss the role of knowledge in organizations and use the literature on tacit knowledge as a guide to explain the importance of its elicitation for institutional memory expansion and preservation. I then propose: (1) the use of tacit knowledge elicitation as a mediator, and (2) recommend training and a learning organization environment as moderators, for the contribution to take place. Finally, I suggest that organizations: (a) Elicit tacit knowledge sharing at their human capital development training programs (b) develop and implement this trainings at managerial levels, and (c) a "know-why" method to elicit and capture tacit knowledge in a reference guide, to consequently add value to the institutional memory, I conclude with a discussion of implications and limitations for the proposed perspective, and provide suggestions for future research.

Recent public health scholarship finds that health outcomes are explained by the social and individual determinants of health rather than the individual-level determinants alone. The individualistic perspective has dominated the 20th century institutionalization of public health in the United States where the public health system has tended to focus largely, if not exclusively, on individual factors. This persistent orientation lies in contrast to another set of perspectives that have also persisted, focused on social causes, which are currently dominant in contemporary public health academic literature and in major, international health organizations. Whether the orientation within the United States is due to a prevailing paradigm among public health officials or is the result of new ideas about health causation being dampened under organizational weight is unknown. Despite public health being central to decreasing morbidity and mortality in the 20th century, significant gaps remain in researchers' understanding of what influences practice in the American public health system. My dissertation research investigates the broad outlines of the determinants of health as understood by state public health administrators. I study how the understanding of the determinants of health affects the practice of public health through analyzing how the ideas of state public health administrators interact with the organizational dynamics of the public health organizations they lead. This mixed-methods dissertation uses survey research and in-depth interviews and quantitative and qualitative analysis. I find that state public health officials' professionalization, length of tenure, level of education, and gender affect the perspective of health causation to which they adhere. I also find that the state public health officials with a social health frame more commonly report they are situated in organizations that are learning environments. Both organizational and ideational factors influence public health practice. The interview data expand this finding to paint a complex picture of organizational and ideational factors influencing one another as well as resulting practices. This research reveals that state public health officials often have strong health frames that are only able to shape the edges of their practice due to the political and organizational dynamics interacting with state public health departments. / Ph. D.

Submitted by JOSIANE SANTOS DE OLIVEIRA (josianeso) on 2019-03-15T12:58:27Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Karen Kvieczinski_.pdf: 1524927 bytes, checksum: 7c8aa87ff582b857370f1473ccbca57c (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2019-03-15T12:58:27Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Karen Kvieczinski_.pdf: 1524927 bytes, checksum: 7c8aa87ff582b857370f1473ccbca57c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-07-03 / Nenhuma / Esse trabalho tem como objetivo analisar as evidências possibilitadoras para a formação e atuação de líderes educadores em uma rede de varejo que busca desenvolver uma cultura de aprendizagem, considerando a percepção dessas lideranças e de suas equipes e dos empreendedores através de uma pesquisa-ação. A empresa em foco atua no ramo do comércio varejista, segmento vestuário, e possui 13 lojas no estado do RS. O estudo foi realizado por meio de pesquisa qualitativa, que se baseou na pesquisa-ação através de entrevistas, grupo de reflexão, grupo de foco e diário de bordo. Consideraram-se como participantes os três diretores, as 13 lideranças e 13 colaboradores, um de cada liderança. O tratamento desses dados foi utilizado sob olhar da análise de conteúdo, que se definiu considerando as categorias: 1 – Líder Educador; 2 – Organizações que Aprendem, desafios encontrados; 3 – Cultura Organizacional, elementos que viabilizam e que dificultam essa atuação de Líder Educador. Cada categoria originou subcategorias que foram referenciadas nas técnicas utilizadas na pesquisa-ação: Diagnóstico – intervenção e feedback. A revisão teórica abarcou conteúdos de Líder Educador; inicialmente primou por características de Líder e de Educador, para depois considerar as de Líder Educador, bem como também contemplou organizações que aprendem e a cultura organizacional. Para contribuir com a organização, a presente pesquisa apresentou os resultados que foram transformados em produtos; além disso, acredita-se que esta pode contribuir com futuras pesquisas e com a trajetória e realização profissional de lideranças, assim como no direcionamento de organizações do ramo do varejo e outras que estejam dispostas a contemplar uma cultura de aprendizagem – “organizações que aprendem”. / The objective of this paper is to analyze evidence for the education and performance of educational leaders in a network of retailers who aim to build a learning culture, taking into consideration the perception of these leaderships, their staff, and other entrepreneurs through an action research. The company in focus works in the retailing trade, selling clothes and apparel, and it has 13 stores in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. This study was carried out using qualitative research, which was based on action research through interviews, reflection groups, focus groups and a logbook. We considered as participants all of the three directors, as well as the 13 leaderships and 13 collaborators from each leadership. The collected data was studied applying the concept of content analysis, which was defined considering the categories: 1 - Educational leader; 2 - Learning organizations, challenges encountered; 3 - Organizational culture, elements that make feasible and that make difficult the performance of an Educational leader. Each category gave origin to subcategories that were referenced in the techniques used in action research: Diagnosis- intervention and feedback. The revision of the theory covered the topics of educational leadership, initially emphasizing the characteristic of a Leader and Educator, and later considering those of a proper Educational leader, as well as organizations that learn the organizational culture. In order to contribute to the referred company, this research presented results which were transformed into products. Furthermore, it is believed that this may contribute to future research and to the personal achievement and professional fulfilment of leaders, together with the beneficial targeting of retail organizations and others companies which are willing to make use of a learning culture- “organizations that learn”.