Learning organisations

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Learning organisations
Nathalie Greenan Centre dEtudes de lEmploi and
TEPP-CNRS Edward Lorenz University of Nice-CNRS
OECD/France workshop onHuman resources,
education and innovation, 7-8 December 2009
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Outline

• What is a learning organisation?
• A quantitative assessment at the European level
  based on the EWCS?The spread of learning
  organisations?The trend in work complexity
• Policy issues

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What is a learning organisation? (1)

• An organisation able to adapt and compete at low
  cost through learning
• Common definitional ground
• ? multi-level concept individual-team-organisati
  on
• ? role of learning cultures beliefs, norms and
  values supportive of employee learning
• ? specific HRM policies supportive of learning
  culture

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What is a learning organisation? (2)

• Tradeoffs in organisational design
• ? stimulate dynamic properties / provide
  stability in the organisational structure
• ? standardisation/routine versus mutual
  adjustement/innovation
• Scientific and technical skills
• deal with an employee participation contraint to
  innovation in order to avoid conflicts between
  vested interest in the organisation ?
  characteristics of the innovative idea ?
  socio-demographic characteristics of the
  workforce ? soft skills ? group processes ?
  customer focus ? transparency and fairness

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The spread of learning organisations in the EU-15
(1)
Source EWCS 2000
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The spread of learning organisations in the EU-15
(2)
Source EWCS 2000
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Learning organisations and innovation mode(1)

• Countries with a high proportion of learning
  forms of work organistion have more lead
  innovators higher in-house creative capacity
• Countries where lean and taylorist forms of work
  organisation dominate have more non-innovators
  and technology adopters more reliance on outside
  suppliers of new technology

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Learning organisations and innovation mode (2)
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Learning organisations, HRM and organisational
culture
Source EWCS 2005
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Learning organisations in public and private
sectors in EU-27
Source EWCS 2005
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The complexity paradox (1)

• 4 core characteristics of complex work
• Complex tasks
• Learn new things
• Choose or change the order or tasks
• Choose or change the methods of work

Source EWCS 1995, 2000 and 2005
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The complexity paradox (2)
Source EWCS 1995, 2000 and 2005
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The complexity paradox (3)

• Work complexity has all the more decreased that
  forces are present that should contribute to its
  development ICT diffusion, growing experience
  and education, development of the service sector
• Increasing heterogeneity across EU-15 evidence
  of a country effect in this trend
• Objective reasons? standardisation?
  polarisation
• Subjective reasons? overqualification?
  organisational changes

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Policy issues Innovation

• The bottleneck to improving the innovative
  capabilities of European firms might not be low
  levels of RD expenditures, which are strongly
  determined by industry structures and
  consequently difficult to change, but the
  widespread presence of working environments that
  are unable to provide a fertile environment for
  innovation.
• If this is the case, then the next step for
  European policy is to encourage the adoption of
  pro-innovation organisational practice,
  particularly in countries with poor innovative
  performance.

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Policy issue Training

• At the individual level, further training is
  positively correlated with learning and lean
  forms of organisation
• Institutional set-up matters a mobile workforce
  and labour market policies emphasising
  expenditures in further training favour learning
  types of jobs
• Could a lack of intermediate skills acquired in
  vocational education and further training create
  a learning bottleneck and favour more
  standardised organisations?
• Need to target further training policies on part
  time and precarious workers

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Policy issue HRM practices

• evaluation practices, employment security and pay
  system based on collective performance are
  positively correlated with learning and lean
  types of jobs
• Learning cultures mediates the impact of HRM
  variables on the likelihood of employee learning
• HRM policies probably play a role in mitigating
  conflicts in change situation
• Need to identify best HRM practices conditional
  on innovation patterns and institutional settings
  

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Conclusion measurement issue

• Indicators for innovation need to do more than
  capture material inputs such as RD expenditures
  and the available pool of technical and
  scientific skills. Indicators also need to
  capture how these material and human resources
  are used and whether or not the work environment
  promotes the further development of the knowledge
  and skills of employees.
• Need for more data to inform evidence based
  policy taking into account the interaction
  between institutions, learning models of
  organisation and innovation patterns.
• A survey instrument linking information from
  employers with information from employees would
  allow to build a rich set of indicators for
  scoreboards as well as conducting research giving
  analytical insights to set hard facts into
  context.