Organizational citizenship behaviour and organizational learning climate relationship

AuthorMine Türker
PositionMarmara University, Istanbul, Turkey
Pages182-188

Page 182

Introduction

Organizations always have long-term plans but in a benevolent environment they don't very much need to think about the future of organizations, they are assured by their ways of doing business. But when environment begins to change; they are confused about the decreased organizational performance and rantability. Continuous change proved the fact that gained superiority does not give an advantage unless it can't be dublicated by others and these conditions -we called shortly global competition- forced organizations to learn new ways of business rather than apply known solutions (Baldwin et.al., 1997). Of course, it is not easy to play a game If the rules are constructed while you are playing. So when organizations search for unknown business development in an unpredictable environment, they have to generate the knowledge to construct new mechanism for organizational goals accomplishment.

As Baldwin et.al., (1997:47) said "when the speed of change exceeds the limits of our system to make sense of it, the change becomes unpredictable", these conditions stress the concepts -innovation, flexibility, responsiveness- that organizations should use to adapt and enact to environment for sustained advantage in long term. In the last decade, organizations search for work behaviours beyond the traditional means of performance. In this perspective, the importance of learning concept is revealed. Organizations learn by through individuals but if they want to preserve the knowledge while individuals come and go, knowledge have to be shared in organization and become a part of work behaviours, procedures, politics etc. that we can talk about an organizational learning.

As a necessity, organizational learning mechanisms and employees' behaviours as first step of organizational learning have to be well understood. Organizations will become more dependent on employees who are willing to contribute effective

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organizational functioning, regardless of their formal role requirements. In this respect, employee behaviours like citizenship behaviours become more important and even crucial for organization's survival. In this study, organizational citizenship behaviours and its relationship with organizational learning climates is studied. Learning climate characteristics and the antecedents of organizational citizenship behaviours is compared and as a result of this comparison; organizational learning climate is explained as a contextual factor that facilitate employees to show citizenship behaviours.

Organizational learning

With an open system perspective, organizational survival depends on the relationship with its environment and learning is the main step of adaption and reaction of organizations. Organizational learning or learning organizations are become highlighted concepts as organizations need to take action beyond the traditional ways of doing business that become useless in changing environment. As environment becomes more dynamic nearly for all businesses in this global competition, organizations need to adapt and act quickly to keep up with at least the speed of change. Environmental conditions make organizations to have stronger incentives to renovate conditions. Organizational learning involves new responses or actions that are based on the environmental changes interpretation (Daft&Weick, 1984). Continuous improvement requires a commitment to learning (Garvin, 1993).

Luthans (2001) said that portraying an organization as a learning system is not new, Frederick W. Taylor tried to transfer learning to workers by his scientific management methods to increase productivity. However, organizational learning usually attributed to Chris Argyris and his collegues work (1978) (single-loop and double-loop learning) and become popular with Peter Senge's study (adaptive and generative learning). Peter Senge described learning organization in his book "Fifth Discipline" (Senge, 1990) as "where people continually expand their capacity to create the...

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