Abstract Many of management theorists describe learning organization as a living and evolutionary system that enhances its performance by acquiring knowledge. "Thinking about future or future building" and "increasing learning capacity" are two key factors that have been emphasized by the authors of learning organizations. In new century, learning is survival for organizations and those organizations that do not make productive learning no longer to be lived. Managers may have unreal understanding about the amount of learning in their organizations and need a device for measuring the characteristics of learning organizations in it. This article developed the required indicators for measuring five main characteristics of learning organizations including: leadership, manpower, organizational design, organizational culture and mission/strategy characteristics, and examined content validity, construct validity, convergent validity and discriminate validity of the measurement devices with Delphi, confirmatory factor analysis and variable analysis methods. The proved indicators in this study formed a questionnaire that may be used for measuring the amount of learning organizations characteristics in different firms and organizations.

Abstract Vajhollah Ghorbanizadeh ,Asgar Moshabbaki2 1. Ph.D. Student of Management, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran 2. Associate Professor of Management,Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran Received:4/17/2005 Accept:1/7/2006 Abstract Creating and protecting competitive advantage by organizations in the 21st century, requires identifying affective environmental changes on organizations, agility and adoption with those changes and increasing capability for answering the various needs of customers. Only learning organizations have these properties. For being learning, organizations apply a process that includes four sub processes including: 1) identifying and creating information, 2) interpreting and transforming information, 3) applying information at work/ creating knowledge, and 4)institutionalizing of knowledge. Applying these processes requires organizational fitness and specific characteristics of leadership, manpower, organizational design, organizational culture, mission and strategies. These characteristics facilitate learning and becoming learning organization. Innovative aspect of this research is that it provides a model that identifies learning levels of the automobile pieces manufacturing firms based on learning process and learning organization characteristics. The obtained results indicated that learning level differs from one firm to another and we can divide all organizations to three levels: 1) data oriented, 2) information oriented and 3) knowledge oriented with respect to their focus on data, information and knowledge. Considering how much learning process is applied and how much characteristics of learning organizations are obtained, each organization lays on one of the mentioned category levels.

Abstract Emergence of different approaches in the field of Organizational Development has raised the question that which approach Fits which organizational conditions for achieving Organizational Development. In order to answer this question Organizational Development approaches are divided into three categories. The first category is composed of those approaches in which radical and top-down changes along with using information technology are emphasized. Business Process Reengineering is the typical approach in this group. Those approaches that focus on partial moderate changes and give importance to quality of production and services fall in the second category. Total Quality Management can be labled as a typical in this group. The third category includes the approaches in which gradual change through organizational learning makes an organization prepared to meet environmental changes. Learning Organization can suitably referred to as a typical approach in this group. Having applied the technique of Critical Success Factor (CSF) to the corporate’s states of financial, market and customer satisfaction, we proposed a model to fit situational factors to effective organizational approaches. This model was emprically tested in serveral Iranian enterprises.