The current social, economic and technological climate requires the management of change, which is sustainable. One sustainable corporate quality will be the ability to learn as an organisation. Individuals have traditionally equated learning with the acquisition of knowledge, during early age. The understanding of learning changes as individuals learn as a group within an organisation. Often organisations fail to make the connection between learning and training. To become learning environment there should be an existence of three critical issues, namely, individual, team and organisational learning. The five requirements of learning organisation, namely, systems thinking, personal mastery shared vision, team learning and mental models should be mastered to build a learning environment. A learning environment seeks to create its own future, which assumes that learning is an ongoing and creative process for its members. The concept believes that organisations, which learn develops, adapts and transform itself in response to the needs and aspirations of the people. One of the reasons to fail this connection would be the absence of immediate tangible benefits that organisational learning can provide. The other difficulty could be in translating the theory into practice in the absence of explaining the process sequentially. Organisations are experiencing the need to develop capabilities to handle challenges irrespective of the barriers. The learning organisation constitutes a new perspective on learning which emphasise a shift in organisational management with respect to education, training and development. One way of adopting such capabilities is through adopting the precepts of the learning organisation. The academics, management and practitioners have joined hands in unravelling the concepts and processes of the learning organisation and change management. The study attempts to examine and explain the thinking and synergise various approaches to provide the relationship between the organisation change in Eskom by creating a learning environment. This is not a prescriptive document or critique on the current philosophy, but to create a learning environment model for Eskom within which change will be effected. The information will assist Eskom to accelerate its learning rate to sustain competitive advantage. The organisation needs to embrace change rather than to react to solutions. / Thesis (D Admin (Public Administration))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / School of Public Management and Administration (SPMA) / unrestricted

This study explores the capabilities of collaborative intermediary organisations (CIOs) and its value generating potential at the city scale. As an emerging organisational form, CIOs create public interest value by creating specific platforms for deliberations and collaboration between diverse stakeholders. This study is important in light of growing and divisive economic and social disparities. Effective solutions to complex problems require legitimate collaborative platforms aimed at creating public interest value. CIOs are one such platform. This study first explores the Johannesburg inner city context to understand the potential and design implications for CIOs. It furthermore identifies CIO capabilities and explores the question of how CIOs create value. Sixteen interviews with CIO leaders, experts and sector representatives from business, government and the community involved with CIOs were conducted. Semi-structured interviews were used to gather qualitative data which was analysed through content analysis. The research findings suggest that despite a challenging partnership context, through particular design considerations and relevant organisational capabilities, CIOs are a useful and noteworthy enabler for public interest value creation. The identified capabilities are collaborative leadership, the ability to build trust in action, supporting weaker sector to fulfill mandates, sound analytical skills as well as distinctive attributes which emphasise a commitment to the long term. CIOs create value directly by convening partners, providing a neutral platform and a ‘translation’ service, as well as through creatively leveraging diverse perspectives. The findings further show that leadership and mutual interest between sectors are the primary sources of CIO value. The value is realised through interaction between the respective partners which provides a host of intangible benefits. The study furthermore shows the potential of capable CIOs to activate further collaborative value. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / zkgibs2015 / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / MBA / Unrestricted

A substantial amount of work in the field of strategic management has attempted to explain the antecedents and outcomes of organizational learning. Though multinational corporations simultaneously engage in various types of tasks, activities, and strategies on a regular basis, the transfer of organizational learning in a multi-task context has largely remained under-explored in the literature. To inform our understanding in this area, this dissertation aimed at synthesizing findings from two parallel research streams of corporate development activities: strategic alliances and acquisitions. Structured in the form of two empirical studies, this dissertation examines: 1) the strategic outcomes of alliance experience of previously allying partners in terms of subsequent acquisition attempts, and 2) the performance implications of prior alliance experience for acquisitions. The first study draws on the relational view of inter-organizational governance to explain how various deal-specific and dyadic characteristics of a partnership relate to partnering firms’ post-alliance acquisition attempts. This model theorizes on a variety of relational mechanisms to build a cohesive theory of inter-organizational exchanges in a multi-task setting where strategic alliances ultimately lead to a firm’s decision to commit further resources. The second study applies organizational learning theory, and specifically examines whether frequency, recency, and relatedness of different dimensions of prior alliances, beyond the dyad-level experience, relate to an acquirer’s superior post-acquisition performance. The hypotheses of the studies are tested using logistic and ordinary least square regressions, respectively. Results analyzed from a sample of cross-border alliance and acquisition deals attempted (for study I) and/or completed (for study II) during the period of 1991 to 2011 generally support the theory that relational exchange determines acquiring firms’ post alliance acquisition behavior and that organizational routines and learning from prior alliances influence a future acquirer’s financial performance. Overall, the empirical findings support our overarching theory of interdependency, and confirm the transfer effect of learning across these alternate, yet related corporate strategies of alliance and acquisition.

This research sets out to provide enhanced knowledge on the impact of transformational leadership on employees' innovation behavior. In particular, drawing on leadership and innovation literature, this research attempts to examine such a relationship by both theorizing and testing the extent to which employees' readiness for change mediates on it. Moreover, this research takes the view that the effectiveness of transformational leadership varies according to the presence of different moderating variables. As such, employees' perceived high commitment work system of their firm as well as these employees' learning capability are examined as moderators on the aforementioned relationship. I collected multi-source and supervisor-employee matched data from two hotels, and the results of data analysis supported the total effect of transformational leadership on innovation behavior, the mediating effect of readiness for change, as well as the moderating effect of employee learning capability. The moderating role of high commitment work system was also found significant but opposite to the initially hypothesized direction. Practically, this research offers implications to managers the importance of leadership on facilitating the change and innovation processes in organizations.

The goal of this study is to stimulate dialog in the research community around a model of learning linked to leadership in organizations. It is an attempt to integrate various communities of practice and divergent approaches by placing equal emphasis on developing a model of organizational learning as well as on embedding the development process itself into the context of a scientific dialog. A model of how learning in organizations can be conceptualized as a role negotiated between superiors and their subordinates is developed and investigated. The model postulates that individuals in organizations accomplish learning by specializing in certain learning tasks. This specialization is based on role behaviors and resources that constrain or facilitate learning opportunities negotiated in the workplace between subordinates and their superiors. How this learning may be shared to result in organizational learning and implications for theory development are discussed.

This paper examines activity-based costing (ABC) as a tool for organizational learning. More specifically, it is suggested that ABC can help business organizations engage in adaptive as well as generative learning. ABC facilitates adaptive learning by supporting continuous improvement and the management of existing knowledge. It facilitates generative learning by supporting the development of a learning culture and the social context in which new mental models can be developed. Important guidelines for implementing ABC to enhance organizational learning are distilled from a mini case study of a health care services provider.

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Organizations increasingly engage in launching new products, but they show heterogeneous decision-making patterns in new product strategies. This dissertation attempts to study the source of organizational heterogeneity in new product introductions (NPIs) by applying behavioral perspectives. To this end, this dissertation examines how organizations respond to the conditions of themselves and others through various decisions on new product introductions. I propose that organizations learn directly from their own experience that is relative to their own historical experience and their peers’ experience (i.e., performance feedback) and respond to it by jointly combining different aspects of NPIs such as NPI exploration and speed. Highlighting the perspectives of external actors, I also postulate that when organizations learn vicariously from their peers’ experience is contingent on the characteristics of peers and industry that are sending different signals to observing entities, such as external actors. Through three essays, I examine these ideas in the U.S. movie industry where movie studios rely on performance feedback and the conditions of others to make subsequent movie decisions.At the heart of this dissertation is the notion that organizations learn from their experience or experience of others by collecting performance information, interpreting it, and changing their NPI activities. This dissertation responds to an important call of Gavetti, Greve, Levinthala, & Ocasio (2012) for research in the cognitive aspects in decision making and the dynamics of interacting behavioral entities—organizations and institutional environments (e.g., peer organizations and investors)—filling important gaps in the literature and hence advancing our understanding of why, when, and which NPI decisions are adopted. / Business Administration/Strategic Management

This dissertation study seeks to better understand two main ideas around institutional advancement in higher education: the knowledge and evidence that informs practice and the structures and systems are set up for the sharing of this knowledge and evidence within and across these organizations. I use a conceptual framework based on organizational systems, learning, and culture theories along with the tenants of evidence-informed policy and practice (EIPP) to delve deeper into my research questions. These research questions include: 1) To what extent do advancement divisions value certain types of evidence and knowledge? 2) What types of evidence and knowledge do advancement divisions utilize to inform their practice and policies? 2a) What organizational practices and individual and organizational characteristics, if any, affect which knowledge guides the work of advancement organizations? 3) What organizational learning systems and structures are in place both within and outside advancement organizations that guide practice and internal policy making? 4) What sociodemographic and organizational characteristics, if any, show a relationship with systems and structures of knowledge management and mobilization of institutional advancement shops? I draw on an original data set that combines responses from survey methodology and data from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) AMAtlas Data Miner and Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) (n=1,826). Using a combination of descriptive statistics, ordinal logistic regression (OLR), and linear regression, I add to the literature base on philanthropy in higher education and gain insight into my research questions. The field of institutional advancement is understudied and often relies on anecdotal evidence versus more theory-based understanding of how work is carried out (Drezner, 2011; Drezner & Huehls, 2014; Walton, 2019). These findings push the field’s understanding of what knowledge, evidence, and learning systems and structures drive and guide the work of advancement. Advancement organizations value all types of knowledge and evidence in their work, including tacit, explicit, embedded, and research based. However, there is an incongruency between this valuing of all knowledge and evidence types and day-to-day practice. Practitioners are more likely to use and share tacit, explicit, embedded knowledge and evidence sources than research based. In addition to these findings, I find that advancement practitioners share knowledge and evidence using a multitude of different learning structures and systems both within their organization and across the broader field of institutional advancement. My study uses organizational theory and tenants of EIPP to highlight the ways that advancement practice can be further understood and improved. These improvements are critical to ensure that the field works towards a model of equity and inclusion for all alumni, donors, and stakeholders. In addition, with changing demographics and decreased alumni participation rates, the findings from my study are more important than ever to ensure the sustainability of these organizations for generations to come.

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