Current status and promising directions for research on the learning organization

• Date: 01 March 2018
• Author: Kyoungshin Kim,Karen E. Watkins
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrdq.21293
• Published date: 01 March 2018

CONCEPTUAL PAPER

Current status and promising directions

for research on the learning organization

Karen E. Watkins

1

| Kyoungshin Kim

2

1

University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia

2

Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea

(Doctoral candidate)

Correspondence

Karen Watkins

University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia.

Email: kwatkins@uga.edu

This article examines the state of research on the learning organi-

zation in the field of HRD and future directions that hold promise

for enriching our understanding of organizational learning and the

learning organization. The article differentiates these two streams

of research and explores areas where one body of research may

be useful to the other. The article draws heavily on studies using

the Dimensions of a Learning Organization Questionnaire (DLOQ©).

Emerging work testing cross-cultural validity and levels of analysis,

as well as social network analyses, shows promise in deepening

our understanding of the construct. Finally, a case is made for the

need for studies of learning organization interventions in order to

continue to test the usefulness of the construct of a learning

organization for HRD practitioners.

KEYWORDS

DLOQ, learning organization, organizational learning

1|INTRODUCTION

Once deemed a distant vision of an ideal state, the learning organization has been a stable construct in studies in

HRD for over 20 years (Lundberg,1989; Senge, 1990). In order to understand what is intrinsicallyinherent in concep-

tions of a learning organization, it is important to first define learning at the organizational level. This is particularly

imperative if one seeks to measure learning at the organizational level—orin the case of the related learning organiza-

tion construct, what facilitates or enables learning by organizations. Anchored in organizational behavior journals,

scholars seldom discuss the learning organization literature and often dismiss it as little more than consultant speak,

primarily prescriptiverather than descriptive research (Tsang, 1997). Furthermore, learning organizationscholars often

ignore studies of organizational learning, focusing instead on comparing the validity of different conceptions of the

learning organizationor on different measures (Song, Chermack, & Kim, 2013; Swanson & Chermack,2013).

But we cannot prescribe without first describing—or asking ourselves—what change we are trying to effect.

And how do we know it would be valid? To address this conundrum, we begin by looking at differing theories of

how organizations learn and the implications of these different conceptions for understanding the learning organiza-

tion construct and ultimately how a learning organization might be most meaningfully assessed.

DOI: 10.1002/hrdq.21293

Human Resource Dev Quarterly. 2018;29:15–29. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hrdq © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 15