The Fifth Discipline: The Art And Practice Of The Learning Organization

An organization who strives to adapt with the surrounding environment, internally and externally, has a better chance of surviving in a competitive market than one who does not. To be an effective learning organization the management must be willing to listen to its employees and their customers to grow their brands. When management is open with their employees through all levels of the organization, the employees will be more willing to speak their minds. Once employees speak up with innovative ideas, leadership must show they are listening by giving feedback or integrating those ideas into their operations. Human relations allow this type of interaction between leaders and workers to take

For most companies, identifying what a learning organization should be and actually becoming one is tricky at best, impossible at worst. One way that manager's and companies can promote the concept of being a learning organization is to assess whether the company is in need of a short-term fix or whether it is more focused on long-term results. Organizational learning is a long-term activity that will build competitive advantage over time and requires sustained management attention, commitment, and effort. Learning organizations maximize their competitive positions during strong economic times and they prudently train their employees and prepare for change even in turbulent times. As a result, learning organizations and learning

Describe the five disciplines of Senge’s Learning Organisation. In your response, explain how each discipline could be used by a business to ensure that it is successful during a period of change.

Senge, P. M. (1990/2006). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. New York: Doubleday/Currency.

Senge, P. M. (2006). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization (Rev. ed.). New York: Currency Doubleday. ISBN:

Peter Senge was born in 1947, and he graduated in an engineering Stanford and then undertake a Master in Social Systems modelling at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and after that he completed his PhD on Management (Mark,2001). According to Peter Senge , learning organizations are “ Organizations where people continuously expand their capacity to create the results they really want , where expanded and new patterns of thinking are developed, where collective goal is set free, and where people are continuously learning to see the whole together”.

     Senge describes five disciplines that are necessary for a learning organization. "Learning organization" is a catchphrase covering the ideal of an organization built on vision, teamwork, openness, flexibility, ability to act under changing conditions, and so forth and so on. It is an organization where people don't just promote their limited region and privileges, but where they take risks and

Organizations use individual members as instruments of adaptation in learning. However, different parts of organizations (subunits or individuals) may have different learning experiences from the same historical events in the organizations. This creates a need for synergy to convert individual or subunit experiences into an organizational learning in order to harness the benefits. Given that humans have only bounded rational abilities** to perform actions, creating such a synergy is a major management challenge for practitioners, and a topic of scholarly pursuit for researchers. I wish to study how intra-organizational learning may drive innovations, and identify moderators that may influence the relation between intra-organizational learning and

Furthermore, the processes of organisational learning and new knowledge creation should be described, elaborating further on the kinds of processes

EADERS MAY THINK that getting their organizations to learn is only a matter of articulating a clear vision, giving employees the right incentives, and providing lots of training. This assumption is not merely flawed – it’s risky in the face of intensifying competition, advances in technology, and shifts in customer preferences. Organizations need to learn more than ever as they confront these mounting forces. Each company must become a learning

As organizational learning takes a clear presence in today’s workplaces; I am analyzing various case studies to better understand the intentions and impact of such organizational changes. Who benefits from organizational learning? What impact does it have on the economy? Studies suggest the outcome of organizational learning is not guaranteed to result in a win-win situation for all parties and the outcomes differ from one organization to the next. Furthermore education is still designed to instill compliance. There is a danger society will continue to further segment into a class society if top CEO’s continue to heavily benefit from organizational initiatives. Such outcomes suggest organizational learning is not built on firm foundations.

The process of creating the conditions for a learning organization and of challenging long-held assumptions will itself begin to integrate the five disciplines as presented by Peter Senge in his book “ The Fifth Discipline”.

He was the Director of the Center for Organizational Learning at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and as of 2005 was on the faculty at MIT.

The understanding I now have of Organization Development came at a point in which I was personally experiencing it myself. As someone who has undergone a reduction in work force, this course helped me better understand why transitions happen in a company that is going through an economical or global change. As someone who has worked for over 30 years, I experienced this for the first time ever in my life. I did not quite know the gest of what it all meant because I did not have an understanding regarding

Koontz and Weihrich (1990) Organizational development as well as management coincide with one another. Organizational development seeks to offer a systematic process of identifying and solving problems as they occur over time. However, the greatest tasks of organizational developments are determining what techniques to use to make sure the organization continues to improve while fueling the growth of the organization (Koontz & Weihrich, 1990).