Organizational learning 1 l

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Organizational Learning as
an Organization Development
Intervention in Six High-
Technology Firms in Taiwan:
An Exploratory Case Study

Bella Ya-Hui Lien, Richard Y. Hung, Gary N. McLean

Organizational learning (OL) is about how individuals collect, absorb, and
transform information into organizational memory and knowledge. This
case study explored how six high-technology firms in Taiwan chose OL as
an organization development intervention strategy. Issues included how best
to implement OL; how individuals, teams, and organizations learn; and the
extent to which OL activities contributed to organizational performance.
Five themes emerged as findings: (1) using language with which employees
are familiar, (2) implementing OL concepts that are congruent with
employees’ work or personal life, (3) putting individual learning first and
diffusing it to team learning and organizational learning, (4) using the
knowledge management system to create an opportunity for individuals,
teams, and the organization to learn, and (5) linking OL to organizational
strategy to improve organizational performance.

Organization development (OD) is a planned change approach to help orga-
nizations grow and improve their performance (Beckhard, 1975; Beer, 1980;
McLean, 2006). In order to improve performance in the knowledge economy
era, organizations are encouraging employees to embrace change, take risks,
break from the bureaucracy, and find revolutionary ways to ensure the com-
pany’s future. This involves eliminating barriers to communication between
individuals and groups and helping people engage in the type of decision mak-
ing that is most appropriate for the situation (Korth, 2000). OD provides
processes by which organizations can manage such change.

HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT QUARTERLY, vol. 18, no. 2, Summer 2007 © Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) • DOI: 10.1002/hrdq.1200 211

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212 Lien, Hung, McLean

Most organizations must relate to their environments to gain the resources
and information needed to function. These relationships influence organiza-
tional strategies to deal with their environments (Cummings & Worley, 2004).
From a strategic change perspective, organizational learning (OL) has become
an important OD intervention by which to transform organizations
(Cummings & Worley, 2004; Marsick & Watkins, 1994; McLean, 2006).
OL is the process of how learning occurs in organizations; it facilitates greater
alignment among an organization’s strategies, culture, and competitive envi-
ronment. Strategic OD involves organizational transformation and is often
associated with significant alterations in the firm’s business strategy, which may
require modifying the corporate culture, as well as internal structures and
processes to support new directions for the organization. Garvin (1993), for
example, suggested that the highest stage of OL is the learning that results
when it is tied to the strategic objectives of the organization and is targeted at
performance improvement.
OL is important in today’s knowledge economy (Argryis & Schön, 1996)
and usually involves different ways of perceiving, thinking, and behaving in
organizations. Yet few studies have discussed how individuals collect, absorb,
and transform information into organizational memory and knowledge. While
the growth and sharing of knowledge is recognized as one of the most impor-
tant elements in becoming a learning organization (Easterby-Smith & Araujo,
1999; Marsick & Watkins, 1994; Senge, 1990), what has been missing for
many researchers and practitioners in the OD field is an expanded theoretical
foundation for describing how people learn and perform in an organization
(Raybould, 1995; Salisbury, 2001). The research reported in this article
addresses this gap.

Research Purposes
In order to develop an expanded theoretical foundation and understand
better how the existing theory can be put into practice, the purposes of this
study were to determine how learning happened in the six identified high-
technology organizations in Taiwan, how knowledge was created to solve
their organizational problems, and the processes and content of their OL
at the individual, team, and organizational levels. Identifying the specific
processes and content of OL in these organizations will help OD profession-
als understand and perhaps modify their practice based on the outcomes of
the research. Furthermore, it is important from an OD perspective to deter-
mine if the OL programs or activities in these organizations helped them
achieve transformative change to improve performance. Determining other-
wise would raise serious questions about the usefulness of the OL construct
and perhaps cause OD professionals to reconsider the applicability of OL to
their practice.

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Organizational Learning as an Organization Development Intervention 213

Research Questions
High-technology firms in Taiwan are an important context in which to study
OL because such firms play an increasingly important economic role and exist
in an environment characterized by rapid change, ambiguity, and hypercom-
petition (Collins & Clark, 2003; D’Aveni, 1998). Just as DeVol (1999) con-
cluded that high-tech industries are playing an increasing role in the U S. and
regional economies, so also are they in Taiwan, with the government goal to
make Taiwan a “high-tech island” (Chang & Chen, 2002). In order to sustain
competitive advantage, many companies in Taiwan have adopted the concept
of OL as an OD intervention strategy (Lien, Hung, Yang, & Li, 2006). How-
ever, how OL is implemented and how it influences organizational perfor-
mance is not well understood, though it has attracted the attention of industry
practitioners and scholars alike (Hung, Hsia, & Lu, 2002; Lien, 2002).
This study addressed the following questions related to the six high-
technology firms studied in Taiwan:

1. How did these organizations experience OL as being best implemented?
2. How did these organizations’ individuals, teams, and whole organization
learn during the OL process?
3. To what extent were the OL activities within these organizations
perceived to contribute to organizational performance?

Theoretical Framework
This section describes the theoretical framework, specifically related to OD and
OL, on which the study was based.
Organization Development. There has been no agreed-on definition of
OD, though there have been many attempts. Burke (1994), for example,
using a cultural perspective, defined OD as a planned process of change in
an organization’s culture. French and Bell (1999), from a long-term effort
perspective, suggested that OD aims to develop the problem-solving capa-
bilities of organizations, while Beckhard (1975) and Beer (1980) focused on
OD as a process of organizational change. McLean (2006) provided a holistic
definition of OD:

Organization development is any process or activity, based on the behavioral
sciences, that, either initially or over the long term, has the potential to develop
in an organizational setting enhanced knowledge, expertise, productivity, satis-
faction, income, interpersonal relationships, and other desired outcomes,
whether for personal or group/team gain, or for the benefit of an organization,
community, nation, region, or, ultimately, the whole of humanity [p. 9].

When OD emerged in the 1960s, it focused primarily on individual and
group-level interventions (Rothwell, Sullivan, & McLean, 1995). Later, the


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field expanded to encompass organizational-level interventions, including
strategic change (Chapman, 2002). According to Cummings and Worley
(2004), organizational transformation, a recent addition to strategic OD that
is still in its formative stage of development, aims at transforming organiza-
tions by changing the basic character or culture of the organization.
Within the context of this study, the definitions offered for OD and our
emerging understanding of strategic OD suggest that certain interventions,
such as OL, might be effective in bringing about organizational culture change
and serve a transformational role in the organization.
Organizational Learning. OL refers to the capacity of an organization to
change and improve continuously. OL helps organizations to move beyond
their current situation by solving existing problems and ultimately transform-
ing the organization. It results in the development of a learning organization
where empowered members take responsibility for strategic direction.
OL can be viewed as a technical or a social process. The technical view
assumes that OL is the effective processing, interpretation of, and response to
information, both inside and outside the organization (Easterby-Smith &
Araujo, 1999). The social perspective of OL focuses on the way people make
sense of their experiences at work. However, Argyris and Schön (1996) believed
that organizations learn through individuals acting as agents, and they defined
OL as the detection and correction of errors. According to Korth (2000), Argyris
and Schön’s work linked individual learning to organizational learning and
came from an OD perspective, emphasizing double-loop learning.
Kim (1993) posited that while OL has gained considerable attention, there
is little agreement on what OL means and how to use it to create a learning
organization. Senge (1993) also stated that there is no formula for creating a
learning organization. These conclusions were borne out in this study: each
participant organization has its own definition of OL.
According to Lundberg (1995), there are three common components to
the OL definitions: learning is more than the sum of each member’s learning;
OL is not just about rearranging or redesigning the elements of organizations
but is a form of meta-learning that requires rethinking of patterns as they relate
to the environment; and OL embraces both cognitive elements that are shared
by organization members and repetitive organizational activities. These com-
ponents all are relevant to OD, but while Lundberg identified these compo-
nents, there is no evidence that they exist in OL organizations. This research,
then, was designed to determine if these factors exist in these six organizations
and whether they support organizational change and improve organizational
performance.

Literature Review
The OL literature draws a distinction between two complementary research
trends (Gond & Herrbach, 2006; Miner & Mezias, 1996): behaviorist


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approaches view OL as an adaptive capacity of organizations with respect to
their environment, while cognitive approaches focus on the evolution of
knowledge and view learning as a cognitive shift.
For learning as adaptive process, the organization is viewed as a goal-
driven adaptive system (Levitt & March, 1988), and OD and change are incre-
mental (Miner & Mezias, 1996). For the latter, learning as cognitive change,
the organization focuses on knowledge acquisition, information sharing, infor-
mation interpretation, and organizational memory (Huber, 1991; Newell &
Simon, 1972), and OD and change refer to radical logic. From an OL per-
spective, Moynihan’s study (2005) pointed out that most OD interventions tar-
get narrow process improvements rather than a deep understanding of
effectiveness. Furthermore, Moynihan’s study elaborated on two frequently
neglected aspects of OL: learning forums that included routines and the role
of organizational culture.
Slater and Narver (1995) suggested that on the one hand, market orien-
tation and learning orientation are inherent and inseparable; on the other
hand, a learning orientation mediates the market orientation and performance.
Hurley and Hult (1998) further suggested that beyond market orientation, OL
links to innovation.
Few of the sources reviewed in this section, however, provided evidence for
their conclusions. Rather than basing their studies on empirical data, they were
based on assumptions about organizations and the constructs of OD and OL. It
is therefore important that exploratory research be undertaken to begin to pro-
vide evidence of these conclusions. This exploratory study was designed to
explore these concepts further.

Research Methods
This exploratory case study included in-depth interviews, a review of existing
organizational documentation, and observations in six Taiwanese high-
technology organizations. A multiple qualitative case study methodology was
appropriate for exploring a concept for which there has been no previous
research in a given context (Stake, 1995; Yin, 1989). According to Yin (1989),
case studies are the preferred strategy for research that asks “how” and “why”
questions. The use of multiple cases adds confidence to the findings and
increases the reliability of the study (Miles & Huberman, 1994).
Participant Organizations. Initially, participant organizations were
identified through published literature, including trade journals. Additional
participants were identified based on existing relationships. Twelve companies
were identified and contacted; six agreed to participate. The participant
organizations were, as intended, all high-tech companies listed in Taiwan’s top
200 companies; five were considered to be HR benchmark companies in the
high-tech industry (CommonWealth, 2002). The number of employees ranged
from two thousand to twenty thousand. The six high-tech companies were in


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either the integrated circuits (IC) industry or the information industry. All
focused on new technology research and development, had a high percentage
of technology employees, and focused on innovation and developing new
products.
Interview Participants. The study lasted for a year (2003) and included
interviews with leaders who were influential in developing OD interventions
and influencing OL. On-site observations and a review of documentation were
completed by the first two authors. As it was expected that HR practitioners
would be most likely to provide reliable information regarding OD interven-
tions, including organizational learning, senior managers in the HR depart-
ment were identified to provide the informants needed for this study.
Therefore, in each company, two HR managers or HR practitioners doing
OD-related work were interviewed. Twelve individuals were interviewed across
the six organizations. A detailed description of the interview participants is
provided in Table 1.
Research Procedures. Each interview lasted appropriately two hours.
Open-ended, semistructured questions and probes were used to elicit each par-
ticipant’s view of OL in his or her company. The interview protocol asked,
What does OL mean to you? What do you do when you implement OL? What
are the connections among individual, team, and organizational learning? How
do individuals, teams, and organizations learn when OL programs are being
established? What are the results from implementing OL in your organization?
With the participants’ permission, and after providing assurances of anonymity,
the interviews were tape-recorded. Since all interview participants spoke both
Chinese and English well, Chinese was the primary language used, with
English interspersed.
During the interviews, participants were requested to share any docu-
mentation that they had related to the questions included in the interviews.
This process resulted in six hundred pages of documentation (company his-
tories, annual reports, human resource documents, internal training materi-
als, and relevant newspaper articles). Permission was also sought to observe
the OL activities in the high-tech companies. At least one on-site observation
was made in each company; each observation lasted for one to two hours
so the observer could understand more fully the application of OL in each
company.
Data Analysis. The verbatim transcripts (using the original Chinese and
English, as used by the interviewees) were read through twice by the first two
authors without making any notes to get an overview of the information that
the participants provided. Then, through continued reading, the data were
read again, with the readers coding the categories of themes as they emerged.
These were discussed among the research team members, and concurrence
was reached on the categories. Then, reading through the transcripts again,
they identified themes within each category and again discussed the findings
with the research team members. The company documents provided by


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Table 1. Description of Informants
Years Years
Current of HR with the
Name Company Job Title Age Experience Company
Mr. S Z (semiconductor/IC HR director 35ϩ 12 7
industry, 11660 employees,
capital: 100 million)
Miss H Z Training 30ϩ 5 5
manager
Mr. C F (electronic industry, Training 40 10 20
2800 employees, manager
capital: 2 billion)
Miss Ho F HR manager 30ϩ 8 5
Mr. Z T (semiconductor/IC KM manager 40ϩ 4 10
capital: 40 billion)
Mr. G T HR specialist 35ϩ 6 6
Mr. O U (semiconductor/IC HR manager 30ϩ 5 3
capital: 3 billion)
Mr. J U HR specialist 30ϩ 3 3
Mr. V S (semiconductor HR manager 40ϩ 20 15
capital: 4 billion)
Mr. P S KM director 40ϩ 3 15
Miss D W (semiconductor HR general 30ϩ 7 7
industry, 4000 employees, manager
capital: 8 million)
Mr. U W HR specialist 25ϩ 2 2

Note: Company Z: semiconductor/IC industry; 11,660 employees; capital: US $100 million. Company F:
electronic industry; 2,800 employees; capital: US $2 billion. Company T: semiconductor/IC industry;
20,000 employees; capital: US $40 billion. Company U: semiconductor industry; 12,000 employees;
capital: US $3 billion. Company S: semiconductor industry; 2,000 employees; capital: US $4 billion.
Company W: semiconductor industry; 4,000 employees; capital: US $8 million.

participants were included in the text analysis. Observation field notes also
provided useful information in understanding the situations the interviewees
described.
Miles and Huberman (1994) suggested three concurrent steps for the
analysis process: data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing and
verification. Data were analyzed in this manner within cases and across cases.
The specificity of the semistructured interview protocol was a factor in lead-
ing to these themes. An unstructured interview protocol may have resulted in
different themes and may have been more appropriate for an exploratory
study.


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This study was triangulated based on three sources of data (interviews,
observations, and documentation) using three perspectives to interpret the data,
verified by the members of the research team (Patton, 1990). In the analysis
process, the verbatim transcripts were coded independently by two members
of the research team. Efforts were then made to critique and evaluate each
other’s coding. During the nine months required for text analysis, the authors
evaluated each other’s coding and checked initial theme categories. No preset
conceptual categories were used in text analysis, though the specificity of the
questions asked may have directed the interviewees’ responses in such a way as
to create the emergent categories. Documents and observation field notes served
as supporting sources when there were differing opinions on coding and ana-
lyzing. The themes and the categories to which they belonged were debated and
modified when there were differences until a consensus was reached. In addi-
tion, the conceptual figure presented in the findings began to emerge after sev-
eral modifications during the text analysis discussion among the research team
members. In retrospect, it would have been helpful to share the categories,
themes, and conceptual figure with the interviewees to confirm the accuracy of
our interpretations. This did not happen, however.

Findings
The findings are presented according to the three research questions: (1) How did
these organizations experience OL as being best implemented? (2) How did these
organizations’ individuals, teams, and whole organization learn during the OL
process? and (3) To what extent were the OL activities within these organizations
perceived to contribute to organizational performance? Five themes emerged from
the process described: (1) using language with which employees are familiar,
(2) implementing OL concepts that are congruent with employees’ work or per-
sonal life, (3) putting individual learning first and diffusing it to team learning and
organizational learning, (4) using the knowledge management system to create
an opportunity for individuals, teams, and organization to learn, and (5) linking
OL to organizational strategy to improve organizational performance. The five
themes are presented as they relate to the research questions. The direct quota-
tions of interviewees were originally primarily in Chinese; they have been trans-
lated into English by the first two authors and checked by a third scholar who is
fluent in both languages.
How Did These Organizations Find it Best to Implement OL? Two
themes emerged in response to this research question: using language with
which employees are familiar and implementing OL concepts that are con-
gruent with employees’ work or personal life.
Using Language with Which Employees Are Familiar. The participants indi-
cated that when they decided to implement OL, they first established goals
that corresponded with the aims of OD. Most of the HR practitioners in this
study combined OL with their training programs to educate members of their


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organizations about why organizations need thorough OL to become a learn-
ing organization and obtain organizational effectiveness; few organizations
used project-based programs, such as TQC (total quality control) to execute
OL. For example, the HR director of company Z said:

In practice, when we try to implement an OD intervention such as
organizational learning, we may not use the word used in school. When we
decide to implement a program such as OL in our department [HR], most
of the time we will think about how to get employees into this program.
We use the language with which the employees are familiar.

The training manager in company F shared:

When we implemented OL, we were afraid that the employees would feel that
we had added extra work for the employees. So we just embedded the OL in
our existing project, such as our TQC program, because they are familiar
with TQC and run it all the time in our company. We ask the managers to
implement OL through TQC. When they have a TQC meeting, they ask
employees to learn the OL concept and learn together to solve the
problems.

Implementing OL Concepts That Are Congruent with Employees’ Work or
Personal Life. One participant company extended the concept of OL to all of
humanity, so it promoted communities of practice; communities of practice
apply not only to employees’ professional lives, but also extend to their
personal lives. Communities of practice became the mediator for this company
to implement OL. For example, the HR specialist in company T said:

The ultimate goal of OL is to create an environment with superior life edu-
cation. To create a learning organization is to create a superior life education
environment. … We set up a lot of communities of practice in our company
so employees could share their work or life values.

How Do Individuals, Teams, and Organizations Learn During the OL
Process? OL in the respondent organizations involved individual and team
learning with the knowledge dispersed throughout the whole organization.
Three stages of learning existed in the organizations. Several interviewees
agreed that their companies believe that individual learning and team learn-
ing can help the whole organization learn. This implies that individual
learning and team learning are subsets of OL. Two themes emerged to answer
this research question: (1) putting individual learning ﬁrst and diffusing it to
team learning and organizational learning and (2) using the knowledge man-
agement system to create an opportunity for individuals, teams, and the orga-
nization to learn.


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Putting Individual Learning First and Diffusing It to Team Learning and
Organizational Learning. One interviewee believed that when continuous
learning becomes the core value of the company, everyone learns all the
time, creating organizational learning. Some interviewees described their use
of training as their strategy for individuals to learn first, subsequently
followed by individuals influencing their teams to change the behaviors of
team members. The HR manager in company F said:

We have a new vision, a new strategy, and our own core values. As one of
our core values is for continuous learning to become successful, we believe
that if everyone learns all the time, it will diffuse the value to the team to
which he or she belongs, and later on the whole organization can learn.

The training manager in company Z said:

We use the competency concept to promote OL. First, we ask employees to
define their competencies, and then their supervisors should help employees
plan their own learning plan. … Based on the competencies the employ-
ees need, we arrange a self-learning system for each employee. In addition,
we link the learning plan to performance appraisal to make sure they learn
what they need to learn. … We also use a self-management mechanism to
encourage employees to participate in cross-department activities, such as
innovation proposals and process improvement programs. Then they will
have opportunities to learn from others.

Figure 1, a document from a study organization, shows how individuals
improve organizational learning through learning mechanisms, more
specifically, by sharing culture and learning with their teams and, ultimately,
throughout the whole organization.
Using the Knowledge Management System to Create an Opportunity for
Individuals, Teams, and Organizations to Learn. All six companies identified
the importance of knowledge management (KM) in learning. As a result, the
KM system became these companies’ initiatives to create an OL environ-
ment. Several interviewees confirmed that their company’s intranet system
helped study group members provide opportunities to connect individual,
team, and organizational learning. For example, through a study group, indi-
viduals discussed what they knew and did not know. In turn, the group
members provided feedback to each other. Furthermore, individuals
changed, and the whole group changed. As another example, all of the
companies talked about how their KM system became a platform for their
busy technicians to communicate and share their experiences in order to
solve problems. Through their intranet systems, they found a way to solve
their problems, even leaving questions in the system and getting assistance


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Figure 1. Linking Knowledge Sharing and Knowledge Management

e
Valu al
ess
B usin tellectu
In
and Capital

Insider

4. Knowledge-Based
ing
CoP
ink
dL
Knowledge Sharing

an ate 3. Open to
ng e
ari o Cr Intraorganization
Sh t CoP (for example,
e-Learning,EKM) 5. Virtual CoP

2. Communities of
Practice (CoP)
Proprietary
1. Study Group Information Policy (PIP)
FIREWALL

Outsider
Not Related Relationship Between Knowledge and Work Highly Related

Source: Document from company S. Used with permission.

immediately from corporate members whom they had never met. The other
learning example is about individuals grouping as a community to discuss
their thoughts and thinking. The KM manager in company T said:
We have a knowledge management platform and an e-learning platform to
link with and help individual learning. We encourage knowledge sharing
by using our knowledge management platform. There are many resources
with real cases or reports in our company; we ask employees to put this
information in our KM system. And this year, we are going to buy a search
engine to improve our KM system. Then our engineers can look for
information and have improved learning opportunities.

The HR director in company Z said:
We have study groups, not just a book for them to read. We ask members
in a study group to reﬂect on what they read and apply it to their real work
situation, and then they need to present it to their supervisor. … We also
collect good presentations or reports and post them to the bulletin board;
then they can learn from each other. … Every quarter, our employees can,
through study group presentations or the intranet, discuss their thoughts or
work experiences. That is the basic format of our team learning.


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The HR manager in company S shared:

We even have a community of practice focus on knowledge management. We
provide space and invite benchmark companies to share their KM experi-
ences. Everybody wants to know the real successful case, so we run this kind
of community every two weeks. It is quite successful. From study group to
community of practice, employees get used to sharing knowledge and
learning how to share. It all links together, and it seems that we gradually
create our own learning organization.

How Was Organizational Learning Perceived to Have Influenced Orga-
nizational Performance? The results of OL are not easy to measure. Most
companies in our study claimed that they do not use direct indicators to
measure the effects of their OL programs, but they use employee overall job
satisfaction questionnaires or other qualitative data, such as informal conver-
sations with employees, to confirm and correct their efforts at implementing
OL. Some interviewees addressed how they combine performance manage-
ment systems with OL. Some set up employees’ key results areas to check
employees’ performance when they participate in training.
Linking OL to Organizational Strategy to Improve Organizational Performance.
Although most companies agree that it is difficult to measure the results of
implementing OL, these companies describe their belief that OL is connected
to organizational performance. The HR manager in company W asked:

How do we know whether our organization reaches its goals? We have a
scorecard to balance employees’ performance. For example, everybody in our
company should have an ICP [individual competency profile]. We compare it
to his or her position profile, and, if there is a gap, then we provide training
or other techniques to help him or her improve. … Everybody has his or
her own balanced scorecard, and the company has its business balanced
scorecard. If we follow the strategy and deploy it to every level, performance
should be OK.

The training manager in company Z said:

For performance, we focus on satisfaction and turnover rate. We care about
how the learning process proceeds for engineers; we evaluate their satis-
faction once in a while to make sure they are satisfied with their learning. We
do not particularly focus on the results of OL programs.
Figure 2, a document from the study company, uses communities of
practice to explain the relationship between OL and performance. The aim
of Figure 2 is to link organizational learning (all kinds of communities of
practice, CoP) to measurable performance (the Plan-Do-Check-Action
[PDCA] cycle).


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Figure 2. Interaction Model for Communities of Practice
and Organizational Project Team

Performance Top Management
New Vision Support
and Strategic Guidance

P
A D
C Functional / Project-Based Knowledge Management
Team Learning Mechanism
Culture Environment
Deming’s Time Innovation Experiences
Incentive System
PDCA Cycle

Leadership Management
CoP
Professional Customer Service
CoP CoP

Language Programs Study Group
CoP CoP

Source: Document from company S. Used with permission.

Figure 3. Key Factors in Organizational learning Processes

OL Strategy
Result
Goal

OL Techniques

Feedback

Conclusions and Discussion
From the ﬁndings related to each of the three research questions, the research
team developed a model to depict the overall conclusions about OL in the
respondent high-technology organizations in Taiwan. This is presented below,
along with the appropriate explanation and discussion of the model.
OL Processes. The OL processes that emerged from this study are
described in Figure 3.
Based on the study themes, the proposed model for OL processes answers
the ﬁrst research question. The model has three parts: the goals for using OL


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as an OD intervention, OL strategy and OL techniques to implement OL con-
cepts, and the results of implementing OL. From the findings, the goals in
implementing OL can be summarized as improving organizational effective-
ness, enabling individual active learning, and improving products and service
quality through learning and innovation. Strategies for implementing OL
included combining performance management and development programs
related to OL, setting up a knowledge management system to enable learning,
and cultivating a supportive, open, and flexible culture for employees to detect
errors and make decisions about improvement. The techniques for imple-
menting OL included forming study groups to encourage people to absorb
new knowledge or insights, training study group facilitators with dialogue and
empathy skills, and creating communities of practice to help employees share
their experiences and improve their innovation capabilities.
Hendry (1996) confirmed the positive effects of using communities of
practice to promote OL. He argued that in the case of transformational change,
the psychological engagement required for reframing is not normally possible
without a deeper level of involvement among stakeholders in the system.
It occurs, for example, when participants take part in communities of practice
where new cultures are constructed through experiential learning and rework-
ing of cognitive structures, an approach important for OL to occur. In the
proposed model, the results of implementing OL are connected to the goals.
The results should be evaluated based on the company’s goals in implement-
ing OL concepts. These six companies evaluated their results in many ways,
often intuitively and qualitatively, but not specifically based on the effective-
ness of OL implementations.
How Individual and Team Learning Contribute to Organizational
Learning. This study found that there was an expectation of the six companies
that individual learning would contribute to the learning of individual teams
and, ultimately, to their organization. Many of the organizations supported these
relationships through the establishment of communities of practice.
Moynihan’s study (2005) pointed out that organizational routines and
organizational culture influence organizational learning. The forms of organi-
zational routines or culture are shaped when members in organizations engage
in all kinds of organizational CoPs (Lave & Wenger, 1991). In CoP, members
not only share their individual knowledge, but also socially construct their own
knowledge through social learning (Wenger, 2004). From the perspective of a
cognitive approach to organizational learning (Gond & Herrbach, 2006), learn-
ing includes knowledge acquisition and sharing, through different kinds of
CoP—a form of team learning—in which individuals can easily transform their
learning into organizational learning. Just as in Figure 1, organizational learn-
ing takes place when effective team learning happens through all kinds of com-
munities of practice.
There are four ways to describe how individual and team learning
contribute to organizational learning. First, individual learning happens in


hrdq18204.qxd 5/24/07 2:02 PM Page 225


training programs in organizations and through discussion with group
members. Second, effective team learning usually happens in cross-functional
projects. Third, OL happens when the whole organization recognizes the
importance of continuous learning. Fourth, OL can combine with knowledge
management systems to sustain the effectiveness of OL.
Contributions of Organizational Learning to Organizational Performance.
First, the extent and capacity of learning, according to respondents, should be
driven by top management to influence organizational performance. Second, the
content of learning is influenced by the organizational culture. Third, there was
a general observation that organizational learning as an OD intervention
promotes sharing and learning of information and experiences from one
employee to another in an open and flexible manner. Such sharing is perceived
to influence organizational performance in a positive way.
These themes confirm the findings of Yeo (2003) and Johnson (2002) that
the key factors in OL are top management support and the organization’s mis-
sion and vision. The findings also confirm that learning by managers plays a
key role in the creation of knowledge for organizations. Managers are viewed
by most observers as the ones most responsible for introducing change and
learning in organizations (Carlopio, Andrewartha, & Armstrong, 2001). The
difficulty of evaluating training and making a connection between training and
performance confirms the conclusions of McLean (2005).
This study concluded that the learning organization is an advanced state
of OD (DiBella & Nevis, 1998). OL as an OD intervention can help organiza-
tions transform. However, transformational change within organizations
requires a basic shift in attitudes, beliefs, and reframing of cultural values
(Bartunek, 1988). For transformational change, the resources, time, and effort
expended on an intervention need not be large to induce such change if the
system has already reached a certain development point. In order to improve
OL, strategic thinking is needed to make individual, team, and organizational
learning happen.

Contributions to Practice and Future Research
This study contributes to the body of knowledge in OL from an OD interven-
tion perspective by providing a model that explains how OL is implemented
in six high-tech companies in Taiwan. Furthermore, it expands on the contri-
bution of individual and group learning to OL and describes how OL is per-
ceived to contribute to organizational performance. This study also suggests
that communities of practice and knowledge management are important in
understanding how OL is implemented.
This was an exploratory case study situated in a specific industry in one
country. There is a need for much more research into the relationships between
OD and OL. The inclusion of more countries and more industries would per-
mit cross-cultural and cross-industry comparisons. In particular, there is a need


hrdq18204.qxd 5/24/07 2:02 PM Page 226


to continue to focus on the measurement issues raised in this study related to
learning and performance. How do we determine the effectiveness of OL as an
OD intervention? Few suggestions emerged in this study; most organizations
continue to use anecdotal data to determine the effectiveness of training and
OL, yet organizations increasingly are demanding that OD professionals be
positioned to answer this question. In spite of this, all of the organizations that
participated in this study were firmly convinced that OL had contributed to
its performance. Because of this, there remains an ongoing mandate to con-
tinue to research the issues related to OL so we can strengthen the theory and
our understanding of how OL works.

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Bella Ya-Hui Lien is an associate professor at National Chung Cheng University,
Chia-Yi, Taiwan.

Richard Y. Hung is an associate professor at Toko University, Taiwan.

Gary N. McLean is a professor at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.


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