The Learning Organization Concept: A Study on Private Companies in Dubai.

Abstract

Organizational learning is a principal tool in achieving long-term survival and sustainable competitive advantage of an enterprise. The Organizational learning has become a tremendously important topic of interest in recent years. There is considerable debate regarding the importance of organizational learning and its impact on the performance and competitive advantage of the organization. The purpose of this research is to study to which extend the concepts of the learning organization are present in private companies in Dubai. In this study, we used a survey research design, with the organization as the unit of analysis. In the study, we used a convenience sample of private companies based in the Emirate of Dubai, UAE. The target population were managers at all levels: general management, operations, administration, human resources, marketing sales, and technical head because they are well positioned to assess the organizations' learning needs, systems and philosophy, and have an understanding of where the organization stands in relationship to these issues. The survey included demographic information about the firm, and included total number of employees. In this study we obtained 155 (N) respondents in the final sample with complete data. Measuring learning orientation has been framed in the literature by constructs described by Watkins and Marsick (1993; 1999), Senge (1990) and Garvin (2000). Learning orientation was measured using the scale originally constructed and validated by Watkins and Marsick (1999), the Dimensions of the Learning Organization, and Yang, Watkins and Marsick (2004). The DLOQ consists of 55 questions to measure the correlation of seven learning organization dimensions and certain organizational characteristics regarding financial and knowledge performance. Respondents were asked to indicate their perception of the degree to which their organization practices the described behaviors on a six-point Likert-type scale. The data gathered from the survey was then organized in multiple ways for better analysis and entered into SPSS version 22.0. Based on the above findings, we can reject the null Hypothesis that Dubai Private Companies do not embrace the Learning Organization Dimensions & accept the alternative. Thus, we can conclude that Dubai Private Companies embrace to some extend the Learning Organization Dimensions described by Watkins and Marsick which we measured using the DLOQ (Dimensions of the Learning Organization Questionnaire).