The Relationship Between Organizational Learning And Organizational Performance In The Transitional Economy

Today, the modern enterprise is facing rapid technological progress, shortened product life cycle, and the dynamic environment of globalization. Continuous organizational learning and change has become the strongest voice in global enterprise management field in recent decades. Especially since entering the knowledge economy era, enterprises need to promote and improve innovation activities and cultivate innovative abilities through continuous learning. Organizational learning is considered the key source of obtaining and maintaining competitive advantage for enterprises. Hence, organizational learning has become the focus of the topic about the sustainable survival and development ability and promoting competition ability for enterprises. In addition, to establish a learning organization become the starting point and ultimate aim of the academic research and management practice.The existing research of organizational learning is very rich, but at present, the focus debate of organizational learning research has transfer to how organizational learning is beneficial to the development of enterprises from whether organizational learning is beneficial to the development of enterprises, more focused on the functional mechanism of organizational learning. Direct expression of these studies are the introduction of intervening variables, which attempted to build the transformation path from organizational learning to organizational performance. Although the existing research on mediating variable exploration has made certain progress, the defect is they are very scattered, and some mediating variable mechanism is not very clear, including the process and causes of mediating variables’ influence, and the situational conditions on the impact of organizational learning and mediating variables. Meanwhile, most of the enterprises failed in the use of organizational learning as a specific practice to create the competitive advantage. We think there are two reasons, first, the existing enterprises’ organizational learning lack of correct strategic orientation; and second, they ignore the effect of environmental dependencies of organizational learning.In China, enterprises need to adapt to the transformation of the institutional environment. On the one hand, with the constant improvement of institution, some enterprises start to turn more to take the market-centered strategy; on the other hand, the market institution is still weak, enterprises have to use informal institution to find protection and development and take relationship development as a strategic mechanism to cooperate with competitors and government authorities to overcome adverse competition and acquire resources in the face of high transaction costs and intervention constraints by the government. Specifically, existing enterprises mainly take two types of strategy, namely market-centered strategy and guanxi-centered strategy. As a kind of environmental cognitive activity, organizational learning reflects enterprise’s understanding of its institutional environment, and then affects the enterprise’s strategy choice and performance. Institutional frame shapes the direction of organization learning, therefore, organizational learning research needs to attach great importance to the role of institutional environment.In order to further analyze the impact functional mechanism of organizational learning on organizational performance, this paper tried to introduce market-oriented strategy as the mediating variable, institutional environment and environmental dynamism as moderator variables, in order to explore how enterprises learn efficiently in transformational economy from a strategic perspective. Specifically, this paper carried on analyses from the following several aspects:(1) whether organizational learning has a positive impact on organizational performance;(2) whether market orientation plays an mediating role between organizational learning and organizational performance, namely whether organizational learning has effects on organizational performance through market-oriented strategy and specific market-oriented behaviors;(3) whether institutional environment plays positive moderating role between organizational learning and market orientation, and whether environmental dynamism has positive moderation on the relationship between market orientation and organizational performance;(4) whether the moderating effect of institutional environment and environmental dynamism will affect the mediating impact of market orientation, namely whether they influence the transformation path of organizational learning to organizational performance.Around above problems, based on literature reviews and theoretical analyses, this paper proposed theoretical framework and specific research assumptions, and collected data under strict study design. After preliminary statistics, reliability and validity analyses, common methods deviation detection, descriptive statistics and correlation analysis of variables, we tested the hypotheses through regression analysis and other statistical methods. The results show that: organizational learning has significant positive influence on organizational performance; market orientation has significant positive effect on organizational performance; organizational learning has significant positive effect on market orientation; market orientation has significant partial mediating effect on the relationship between organizational learning and organization performance; institutional environment plays a positive moderating role in the relationship between organizational learning and market orientation; environmental dynamism plays no moderating role in the relationship between market orientation and organizational performance; institutional environment has significant impact on the mediating effect of market orientation. As you see, in this paper, in addition to the assumption on environmental dynamism is not supported, the rest of the assumptions are all supported.Finally, this paper has achieved certain results about exploration of the relationship between organizational learning and organization performance. Firstly, this paper contributes to the functional mechanism research of organization learning on organization performance. Market orientation, introduced into the theoretical model as a mediating variable, become an important path from organizational learning to organizational performance; besides, in view of enterprises in the transformation of China’s economy, from institutional environment and environmental dynamism, this paper analyzed they two moderating influence on organizational learning’s functional mechanism. Although the result did not confirm environmental dynamism’s moderating effect, but it is a further test on the heterogeneous conclusions in current research, and we tried to give a better explanation. Secondly, this paper analyzed the relationship between organizational learning and market orientation. For a long time, the relationship between organizational learning and market orientation is controversial, and the debate point lies in which one is a former and which one is the result. Market orientation research as the starting point, most existing research introduced organizational learning perspective, holding that market orientation is the basis of organizational learning. On the contrary, this paper discussed the role of market orientation on organizational learning mechanism with organizational learning as the starting point, emphasizing on organizational learning is the foundation of market orientation. After reviewing studies about their relationship, this paper got a further step to clarify the relationship between them. Finally, this paper emphasized the significance of institutional environment on the relationship between organizational learning, market orientation and organizational performance. In transition economy, institution is a key factor that must be considered for survival and development of enterprises. However, in the existing research of institution and organization, micro level of organizational behavior and strategy analyses are very limited. This article mainly from the view of economic institution, analyzed the influence of institutional environment on organizational learning, market orientation and organizational performance, and expanded institutional theory research in strategic management, which can provides some enlightenment for the future organizational studies about institution.This paper also has some limitations, including the selection of sample, data collection and variable measurement, which need to improve further follow-up studies.