Interaction of Learning Organization and Organizational Structure
Keywords:
organization, learning organization, organi-zational structures, changing, flexible, ent-repreneur, virtual organization, communica-tion in the organization.Abstract
Today organization is the constantly changing, flexi-ble, entrepreneur or similarly titled organization having the peculiar feature – the constant learning in individual, group or organizational level. Constant learning changes not only the enterprise but the employee and the staff as well. The employee should be acknowledged with the phi-losophical provisions of learning and the enterprise must ensure its staff suitable communication, self-realization and motivation system.
Learning in individual, group and organizational level is the object of the research of many scientists (Wiegand, Senge, Nanoka, Levit, March et al (see Al-Laham, 2003)). The importance of individual and organizational culture for learning is especially stressed (Barney J.B., 1986;Sackmann S., 1992, much attention has been given to designing of motivation systems and other questions.
But learning and the progress related with it, and changes proceed in specific surroundings where the per-son-organization is the main character but his/her activ-ity is limited or stimulated by the specific enterprise and the surrounding atmosphere. Every enterprise is organ-ized for some special technological process and this cre-ates some special structure based on labour functional division and specialization. This includes both production and service processes. This is the so called hard structure that often conflicts with requirements raised to learning-changing organization. The hard part of the organization is inert and it changes very slowly. Due to this the con-tradiction between the propagated theory and the actu-ally existing practice exists – the theory development does not find the necessary medium.
One of such hard factors is the enterprise organiza-tional structures. Mintzberg H.(1976, 1983) paid consid-erable attention to their theoretical and practical aspects, new organizational structures were also investigated by Lithuanian authors such as Seilius A., (1988) et al. But this problem is very often analyzed separately when the structural issues are revealed one-sidedly. This work discusses the development possibilities of organizational structures with the requirements of the quickly changing learning organization in mind.
