Organizational learning, change and conflict.

In this reading, knowledge is defined as power and the capacity for effective action, and learning as the process of acquiring knowledge or a skill. The social learning theories explain how human behave in continuous interaction and some environmental influences.

Learning organizations are those places where people expand their abilities to get the result that they really want, these organizations are important because they conduct new ways of doing business in order to stay alive in competitive markets, the organizations must continue to learn these new ways to prevent going out of business, this is due to the fact that new technologies and business practices will eventually catch up to those organizations that don’t try to improve, and to be able to obtain competitive advantage these organizations must be able to learn really fast from their mistakes and failures as well as from the success.

Organizational learning works if the company has the capacity to collect new information and put it into action.

What is the relationship between organizational learning and individual satisfaction?

There is a direct relationship between these two concepts as individual satisfaction is a sense of fulfillment due to a job well done or a goal that has been achieved, if there is individual satisfaction, learning will take place as each individual is part of the organization, this will untimely help the company and make organizational learning much easier to be implemented.

Change is the process of going from a present state to a desired state, this process has become very important within organizations as flexibility and responsiveness are key factors in order to succeed, Change can affect different aspects within an organization, things like strategy, technology and structure, organizational change is composed by planned change that results from deliberate decisions to alter the organization and unplanned change that is imposed on the organization, there are also some scopes of change  such as:

Incremental change: making small improvements.

Strategic change: organizational restructuring.

Transformational change: the organizations move to a different state.

Conflict has some positive consequences as it often lead to new ideas, stimulates creativity and motives change but it also has negative consequences such as diverts energy from work, wastes resources, and creates a negative climate. 

The model of Kurt Lewin has three stages; number one is unfreezing that creates a level of dissatisfaction, then changing which requires organizing the resources to bring the change, and finally the refreezing stage which is embedding the new ways of working into the organization.

Is it possible to change corporate culture? If so, how?

Yes it is possible, culture within a company can be define as an specific collection of values or norms that are share by people in the organizations, this corporate culture can be changed by altering the way the corporation treat employees, this is basically the main way to achieve this change, employees are the most important factor here, as the model of Beer shows us, enforcing new ways of thinking, attitudes and behaving on the employees is a good way to make the change, but this depends on how they respond to those new concepts, which is why the organizations must begin by changing the way it treats its employees in a positive way, making them feel good about working for that particular company.

Information retrieved from: a good way to change corporate culture: http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/2009/06/the-best-way-to-change-a-corpo.html

Information retrieved from: eafit interactiva, organizaciones y culturas course, contenidos

Image retrieved from: managing change, http://www.google.com/searchq=change+and+conflict&hl=es&prmd=ivns&source=lnms&tbm=isch&ei=Ey_TTZKRO9G2tweDhpmsCg&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&cd=2&sqi=2&ved=0CBoQ_AUoAQ&biw=1280&bih=595