The facilitating factors for organizational learning: bringing ideas from complex adaptive systems

Abstract

Abstract The importance of the factors that facilitate organizational learning have traditionally been outlined in the literature. However, there is no agreement about what the essential facilitating factors are, as each author emphasizes different features. Complexity science is increasingly being used by researchers and practitioners to improve their understanding of organizations. This exploratory study tries to determine the essential facilitating factors for organizational learning, and demonstrate the importance of the ideas from complex adaptive systems (CAS) to it. In order to do this, we put forward a comparative case study of four heterogeneous companies from the Spanish ceramic tile sector in which we analyzed the facilitating factors for organizational learning, by relating them with ideas from CAS. As a result, we determined that the five attributes suggested by CAS to facilitate organizational learning were present in the innovative companies, which had the most organizational learning facilitating factors, and three of them were only present in the company with the highest performance and the most innovative approach: individuals' relationship with the environment; cultural diversity; and state of equilibrium between formal and informal structures. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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