Authors

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.

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