The learning organization is the organization of the twenty-first century characterized by rapid changes, tremendous challenges, advances in technology and means of communication, attention to intellectual capital that is generated by the human element.

Definition of learning organizations:

learning organization is a group of people working together collectively to enhance their capacities to create results they are the about. Therefore a learning organization is defined as “ Learning organizations [are] organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together “ – Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, page 3. Also defined as “one that is characterized by continuous learning for continuous improvement, and by the capacity to transform itself’ – (Watkins & Marsick, 1993, 1996).

The concept of learning organizations:

Main concepts mentioned by researchers related to the concept of learning organizations:

Main concept	Researcher’s name	Definition
Action theory	Argyris (1993)	Those working in a learning organization are the main element of growth and development, where they cooperate, activate, and work with the aim of learning, or where they work to produce results, and it is necessary that all knowledge be available to all and used proficiently in effective ways that all those present can operate and benefit from.
Renewal	Braham 1996	Organizational learning is learning in several places as the results obtained benefit in strengthening and constantly renewing the bonds between employees, which motivates the organization to invent the desired future by itself.
Organizational change	Denton 1998	Organizational learning is the ability to adapt knowledge and use it as a competitive advantage. Learning brings about a change in the behavior of the organization and its members, and a change in the organization’s activities and work.
Learning action	Garrat 1995	The learning organization is linked to the learning processes by doing, which is beneficial in increasing the energies of individuals and their learning capabilities in the functional and practical operating cycles day after day.
Technology	Marquardt & Kearsley (1999)	The learning organization possesses creative energies to collect, store, transfer, and disseminate knowledge and information throughout the organization, which is beneficial in bringing about a continuous transformation towards organizational success, as it enables its members to learn from their activities and is interested in using renewable technology to enhance its productivity and learning.
Growth& Survival	Pedler et. Al (1997)	A learning organization is like a fruitful tree, which emits vigor and vitality, and is characterized by growth and survival, and workers are an essential part of this lively tree.
Culture	Schein (1996)	The importance of organizational learning as an essential component of the organization lies in helping those who design key organizational elements learn how to learn, how to analyze and diagnose the cultural components of the organization and integrate these elements and components in achieving organizational success.
Systems	Senge (1990)	The learning organization is concerned with developing individuals who learn to see the organization as systems thinkers, who develop their abilities and personal prowess, and who learn to collectively restructure their mental models.
Team building and team learning	Watkins & Marsick (1993)	A learning organization is an organization that continuously learns, transforms, and develops itself, where creativity and organizational energies are enhanced to promote continuous growth based on work teams.

Based on the foregoing, learning organizations are those organizations that constantly work to develop their ability to learn to generate knowledge and transfer experiences and expertise that entail improving performance and enhancing competitiveness by relying on and empowering work teams and their participation in determining the organization’s vision and goals. Therefore, Senge believes that the most successful organizations can be called learning organizations and that the ability to learn compared to competitors is what makes these organizations have worthy competitive advantages.

Characteristics of learning organizations:

Most management scholars and researchers agree that the speed of learning is the main feature that characterizes learning organizations, and it is the main feature of competition between contemporary organizations in the era of knowledge.  Some researchers stress the need for a learning organization to possess the following characteristics:

• Providing continuous opportunities for learning
• Using learning to reach goals
• Link individual performance to organizational performance
• Encouraging all employees to participate in decision-making
• Constant awareness of interaction with the environment
• Using systems thinking in dealing with situations, solving problems and making decisions
• Rapidly develop and introduce new procedures, processes and services
• Transfer knowledge between parts of the organization and among other organizations quickly and easily
• Investing in human resources at all administrative levels with the maximum possible capacity
• Motivate improvement processes in all aspects of the organization
• Attracting the most qualified human resources.

The need to learning organizations:

The recent technological, social, and economic developments witnessed in the last decade of the twenty-first century led to a change in the work environment, and the emergence of severe competition between organizations for survival, continuity, growth, production, and profits, and it became clear that organizations that cannot continuously adapt to internal and external environment change through organizational learning and acceleration, the levels of performance and improvement of its quality, will end in a short period, and the counterparts that can transform themselves into learning organizations, will deal with change successfully that can survive and continue.

1. Globalization:

Globalization is achieving success in the global economy, which is highlighted by statistics indicating that 100,000 American companies are linked to speculation around the world and that many international companies manufacture and sell mainly outside their countries of origin, which reflects the ability of organizations to learn from their past experiences.

2. Information Technology:

One of the elements of the trend towards strategic change in the world is technological innovation and creativity, and specifically, the application of information technology and change the foundations of business competition.  Despite the large investments in advanced technological information systems and since the role of information technology in achieving the goals of business organizations has continued to increase, the need has arisen to manage these suppliers on a strategic basis due to the importance of these suppliers to business organizations, both goods, and services.

3. Fundamental shift in working methods:

Work methods have changed drastically, employees no longer occupy offices, but at the same time work closely together without meeting each other.  Organizations moved from quality management in the eighties to re-engineering administrative processes in the nineties to the fundamental transformation of business methods as we entered the twenty-first century.  That is, organizations have moved from focusing on reducing defects and modernizing and developing work processes to creating new patterns that enable them to manage continuous change.

4. Increasing customers’ impact:

With their influential power in determining the organization’s workflow plan, customers have become more influential in defining the organization’s strategy and implementation of their operations, in addition to being the source of directing its management to the priority of quality through new standards of performance, diversity in production, timeliness, and continuous response to the needs and aspirations of customers.  The keenness to achieve the desires of customers about the quality of the goods and services they obtain, and to reduce their costs and prices at the same time, has led to the interest of contemporary organizations to employ all their capabilities and energies in the search for the latest methods through which to achieve competitive advantage and market entry, gain new customers and strengthen relationships with different types of customers.

5. Knowledge:

Information has become the most important source of wealth, knowledge has become more important to organizations than any other of their assets, and the human element has become the main source of the organization’s strength, and knowledge is continuously generated in every corner of the organization.  The production of knowledge doubles in every field of the organization, knowledge is necessary to increase the ability of employees to improve and develop performance, knowledge is required to renew products and services, and knowledge is required to change activities, build and solve problems, therefore, knowledge is necessary to provide the organization with competitive excellence in the markets.

6. Evolution of employees’ roles and expectations:

The employees’ performance has evolved significantly in light of the intense competition in the labor market, and organizations require different technical and administrative skills to perform business in a way that enhances the competitive capabilities of organizations, as well as the development of the needs of individuals and their tendency for flexibility and freedom in innovation and creativity, therefore, contemporary organizations have tended to employ freelancing and part-time workers because they have greater flexibility and greater benefit from the mental and innovative capabilities available to those workers.

Based on the foregoing, these combined factors justify the emergence of learning organizations that are keen on acquiring, employing, and disseminating knowledge among their leaders and employees.  Thanks to organizations learning how to learn, benefiting from their successful and failed experiences, and providing an organizational environment that encourages continuous self-learning, this leads to the need for organizations to adopt the learning process.

Building learning organizations:

Senge and a group of researchers at the MIT Institute developed a theoretical study based on the five principles he mentioned in his 1990 book, to determine the capabilities needed to build a learning organization and how to represent it in practice. This proposal was linked to two main fields:

The field of continuous change:

The change process is considered a basic starting point towards building the learning organization, which required changing the intellectual patterns in the short and long term, and the continuous endeavor to develop the capabilities and skills of individuals and enable them to understand the appropriate and effective ways of acting on the daily work in the organization, by developing  Individual and collective skills, abilities, ambitions, personal mastery, and a shared vision;  And the development of the skill of reflection and thinking about the beliefs and behaviors used and their effectiveness, along with review and correction, in addition to improving the ability to see systems and their changes in a holistic view, as people reflect this development through mental models, team learning and systems thinking, and by developing capacities of intellectual awareness and awareness of individuals to variables and the possibilities of solutions to problems and realizing the essence of  activities and behaviors, exchanging opinions, making decisions, hunting opportunities and flexibility in responding to changes, and developing beliefs and assumptions as a result of having new and harmonious awareness and capabilities, and thus achieving a fundamental change in the culture of the organization.

The field of practice and application:

It is concerned with putting the basic principles of the learning organization into action, where the capabilities and skills necessary for this can be developed through:

• Providing guiding ideas and charting steps to focus organizational efforts towards achieving goals, consistency and integration, as well as values ​​and visions that describe the meaning of the organization’s existence and its development prospects.
• Means to help them adopt new models of thinking, build new knowledge within the organization, and develop capabilities and expertise.
• Infrastructure innovations, programs, systems and means to help develop individuals’ cognitive and mental capabilities, such as: team learning, discussion, dialogue, encouragement and incentive systems, and training and development programmes.

Dimensions of learning organizations:

The interest in learning organizations emerged, after the need for these traditional organizations to transform into learning organizations was confirmed.

Senge’s model:

This model was developed by Peter Senge in 1990, which is the first to present a model for the learning organization. The model was built on 5 axes that the organization that wants to transform into a learning organization should work on:

• Systems thinking:

which are an approach and framework based on seeing the whole and not the part, and seeing the interrelationships that link the parts of the system, as well as focusing on the parts themselves.

• Personal mastery:

Which is the ability to clarify the personal vision accurately and clearly, and to see reality objectively, which helps focus efforts, and persevere in achieving what the individual aspires to achieve.

• Mental models:

They are those assumptions, generalizations, and mental images that affect people’s perception of the world, their interpretation of events around them, and how to deal with them.

• Shared vision:

Which is the ability of a group of individuals to paint a common picture of the future of the organization.

• Team learning:

It is the process by which the efforts of a group of people are organized to achieve the results they want to achieve.

Marsick & Watkins model:

Marsick & Watkins in 1993 presented an integrated model of learning organizations based on their definition of learning organizations. This model identifies two essential elements of learning organizations that are integrated and overlapping with each other in influencing the organization’s ability to change and development, which are individuals and organizational structure, and this model focuses on continuous learning for all levels of organization (the level of individuals, the level of groups, the organizational level) where each element includes a group of sub-elements that overlap among themselves to form the seven dimensions of learning organizations, namely:

1. Create opportunities for continuous learning
2. Encourage dialogue
3. Encouraging collaboration and group learning
4. Empowering employees to bring them together towards a common vision
5. Create systems for sharing knowledge and learning
6. Link the organization to the external environment
7. Strategic leadership

James’s model:

James in 2003 presented a model for the organizational structure of learning organizations, which is called the Learning Organization Web, after the criticism, it directed at the traditional organizational structure of organizations that prevailed in the twentieth century and relied on orders, control, authority, multiple division, focus on specialization, and slow adaptation to the environment with  Accelerated change and sharp competition between organizations.

The organizational structure of learning systems tends to transform more than procedures, and this means that each department in the organization must discover knowledge, utilize it, and transfer it, and is interested in applying collective learning at different levels of the organization and working on its development.  The design of this model of the learning organization required an organization that focuses on the components that include (leaders, culture, strategies, systems, structures, knowledge) and on communications that are combined in a network of interactions that affect organizational learning (James, 2003: 46),  The following is an explanation of the components of learning organizations as you see James:

Leadership: It exists at any organizational level, and focuses on learning, teaching, transforming the organization, and providing the intended vision behind the knowledge in the organization.

Culture: The learning organization is characterized by the existence of a renewable culture to ensure continuous improvement and adaptation at all levels. The culture of the learning organization is embodies inequality and justice in rewards.

Dissemination of strategies: The strategies of the learning organization stem from anywhere in the organization, as the formulation of policies is no longer one of the tasks of senior management only, but strategies that focus on learning come from upper, middle, and lower management.

Integrating mechanisms: Mechanisms connect the organization horizontally and vertically and reflect communication and policy processes that develop knowledge sharing and learning across business units, individuals, systems, and processes that connect the organization.

Horizontal structure: The learning organization tends to a semi-independent structure, in which reports are transmitted from the units to the higher management, which exercises its role in determining the ways to achieve the goals.

Knowledge makers: where workers in the learning organization turn into knowledge makers, each of whom is responsible for mastering his/her job and disseminating important information among others in the organization, and they are constantly developing and acquiring the skills that make them effective individuals.

These characteristics of learning organizations are fundamental in the organizational structure that is implemented with the help of a framework of beliefs, balance, infinity, and behavior and have been called The Four Bs (Beliefs, Balance, Bounded, Behavior).

The learning organization network model focuses first on productive learning that encourages workers to see the overall picture and the challenges facing the current situation, which leads to improving decision-making in the organization, then thinking systems become necessary to improve the quality of decisions and help workers to think outside the stereotyped pattern.  The interaction and overlap between the six elements included in the model direct the behavior of leaders, managers, and workers in the organization to increase the discovery, exploitation, and transformation of knowledge. Everyone is charged with participating in decision-making, experimentation, and continuous improvement of the organization.

Marquardt’s model:

This model consists of five necessary sub-systems that contribute to achieving organizational learning and maintaining its continuity and necessary for building learning organizations.  They are learning, organization, people, knowledge, and technology.  And that all of these sub-systems enhance the learning process in the organization, that the learning system intersects and interacts with all other systems in the organization, and that these sub-systems integrate with them to transform the organization into a learning organization.

The learning system in the organization:

The learning system represents an essential element in learning organizations, and it occupies an important position at all levels, and it reflects the learning style, and the basic learning skills necessary to practice the effectiveness of learning in the organization, where learning includes three elements, which are: Learning levels in the organization  Organizational learning skills and learning styles.

Organization:

According to Marquardt, an organization in learning organizations consists of four basic elements: vision, organizational culture, strategy, and organizational structure.  As they are elements that have a clear impact on the behavior of individuals in the organization and determine the method practiced by managers in managing work in the organization.

Personnel system:

The excellence and ability of the organization for growth and leadership are due to its ability to invest in the human element effectively.  The human resource in the organization is considered its most important resource at all, so the personnel system is one of the most important systems that learning organizations are interested in as they are how the organizational goals of the organization will be achieved.

Knowledge system:

It is a set of processes represented in knowledge generation, acquisition, storage, data collection, analysis, research, transmission, dissemination, and application.  And those processes included in the knowledge system in the learning organization represent continuous, interactive, and sequential processes.

Technology system:

The technological system consists of technical devices, tools, networks, systems, structures, and processes that create an environment conducive to the exchange of information and knowledge and learning at a relatively faster speed.  Advanced technological systems for learning the programs and applications they contain, and other tools that lead to the generation of knowledge in different ways.

Factors that lead to support or regression of learning in organizations:

There are cultural factors that lead to support and activation of learning in organizations, and there are other cultural factors that lead to a decline in learning in organizations

A culture that promotes learning:

1. Balance the interests of all shareholders
2. Focus on people more than systems
3. Make people believe they can change the environment
4. Make time to learn
5. Look at problems holistically
6. Encourages open and participatory communication
7. Believe in team work
8. Leaders can be contacted directly.

A culture that inhibits learning:

1. Focus on the systems, not the people
2. You only allow people to change when they have to
3. fast action
4. segmentation problems
5. Restrict the spread of information
6. Believe in individual competition
7. She has a controlling command

Examples of learning organizations:

As Senge said any successful organization that can survive and continues under conditions of intense competition is a learning organization, as learning exists in all organizations, but in different proportions that increase and decrease according to the organization’s ability to collect or generate knowledge as well as benefit from it as a competitive advantage and to bring more opportunities for progress and prosperity.

The following is a list of companies whose systems depend on continuous learning and participation in decision-making and focus on transformational leadership, empowerment, and work teams, and these companies top the world rankings for the top 100 companies around the world according to forbes.com

• Amazon.
• Apple.
• Samsung Electronics.
• Toyota.
• Microsoft.
• Sony.
• Facebook.
• Intel.
• General Electric.
• Pfizer.