A Study On The Effect Of Organizational Learning On Democratic Decision - Making

Information networking, economic globalization and sophisticated science and technology are three prominent features of the 21 st century, in which new problems and challenges constantly emerge. All organizations are thus faced with a major problem – how to pool ideas and solutions to problems and challenges in an effective manner. As a result, democratic decision-making, as a method to stimulate and collect wisdom of crowds, attracts wide attention of many organizations, including Chinese Communist Party. They have probed deep into democratic decision-making and made great achievements in both theory and practice. But objectively, the progress of democratic decision-making is still hindered by many problems both in theory and practice, which need to be explored and solved.This research adheres to the principles of straightforward learning and history recurrence. Problem-oriented, it eliminates perceived ideas in theory to its best, breaks the logical and structural binding of subject knowledge and comprehensively uses the framework of interpretation and conceptual tools of subjects like philosophy, management, social psychology and organizational behavior to analyze the core challenges which impede democratic decision-making and how organizational learning helps solve these challenges. Through mutual criticism among “history”, “experience” and “conceptual logic”, this paper aims to strip away a variety of biases in “truth” and “theory” and to capture the truth behind physical phase.In practice, there are two tendencies in the way of democratic decision-making development: the one is excessive centralization and lack of democracy and the other is overly fractured opinions which fail to generate reasonable decisions. Many factors trigger these two tendencies: system, mechanism, interest, human nature, culture, etc. From the practical perspective of Marxist philosophy, this paper uses the five basic elements of practical activity, namely subject, procedure, objective, object, environment, as a clue in order to figure out the constraints of democratic decision-making and the solutions. Considering that the democratic decision-making in this paper refers to the one in narrow sense in the realm of management, it is actually the process of discussing, analyzing and making decision on proposal in a democratic manner. Therefore, the author supposes the proposal, namely the object, is established. This paper thus lays more emphasis on the other four aspects – subject, objective, procedure and environment.This research has found several constraints of democratic decision-making. The first is concerned with the subject. Cognition loophole, defensive routine, personality defect and other factors of mind of decision-makers, namely the subject, prominently impede democratic decision-making. Then, in regard of the objective, value divergences are mostly caused because of diverse values, uncoordinated performance standards in organizations, over-dispersed targets among divisions, conflict among decision-markers’ performance standards and that between the individual identity and collective identity of decision-makers, exerting direct influence on the progress and results of democratic decision-making. Another constraint lies in the procedure. Factors like administrative power abuse, information control, bystander effect, authority conformism and worship render democratic decision-making into the control of authority. The last one constitutes environmental factors, including inadequate correlation among organizations, bigger mouth effect, illusion of unanimity, in-group favoritism and so on. They all hinder the progress of democratic decision-making.Through learning from and applying relevant theories and methods in the realm of organizational learning, this paper tries to investigate how they can facilitate in democratic decision-making progress. Conclusions are made mostly in these four aspects:First, organizational learning accelerates the transformation of decision-makers’ mind modes. First, knowledge-sharing method directly promotes the fusion of decision-makers’ horizons, ladder of inference significantly lowers social comprehending deviation, its methodology solves linguistic puzzles; second, its mutual investigation can get rid of the obstinate “ego” in order to weaken defensive consciousness, its left-hand column displays the applied theories and the conversation in depth contributes to the construction of collective thinking field; third, the open personality advocated by organizational reliefs one from isolation, the emphasized fairness stimulates mental positive power and the spiritual improvement makes for personality health.Second, organization learning mediates varied values of decision-making objectives. Systematic thinking significantly coordinates performance standards; scenario planning coordinates individual performance conflicts; collective prospect drastically eradicates the conflict between a natural person and an organization member; deep investigation can help organizations realize the conflict between objectives and refine the overly dispersed organizational objectives; trans-boundary consultations can help decision-makers breakthrough position traps; product group structure can coordinate interests of department in the perspective of organization.Third, organizational learning can restrict the authority control in the process of democratic decision-making. The Devil’s Advocate can effectively lower the pressure of noncompliance; knowledge sharing helps restructure information symmetry and turntable games can weaken bystander effect; brainstorming can prevent an authoritative opinion from dominating, reversed way of thinking breaks blind worship away and reasonable question method help ordinary members involved in decision-making establish conceptual confidence.Fourth, organizational learning improves decision-making environment to some degree. Drawing tree diagram of problems sheds light on the connections between problems, thereby promoting mutual cooperation and power sharing; group naming alleviates bigger mouth effect, ensuring every participant free speak his or her mind freely in democratic decision-making process in terms of form; brainstorming plays positive role in overcoming illusion of unanimity and the Devil’s Advocate effectively weakens in-group favoritism.What distinguishes this study from the rest is that it applies the method of recurring history created by Carl Marx. From the perspective of management philosophy, this paper investigates core problems in democratic decision-making and key concepts and methods of organizational learning, as well as their positive role in solving these problems. To be specific, the innovation of this research is in the following aspects: first, different from other scholars, the author focuses on the specific obstacles in the process of micro decision-making process instead of macro ones, bringing into discussions key problems which are often ignored in democratic decision-making; second, introduce key concepts and methods of organizational learning into democratic decision-making, enriching the approaches to solve democratic decision-making. Among all the core problems in decision-making put forward in this paper, some can be deeply discussed and effectively solved within the macro structure of politics, the rest are otherwise. On the contrary, these problems can be explained in a reasonable way in the realm of management philosophy by using management, social psychology and organizational behavior in that some methods and tools of organizational learning can offer practical method to solve problems in practical aspect, which is a major innovation of this paper; last but not least, this paper widens the application scope of organizational learning theories and methods.In all, this paper concludes that organizational learning is a practical method to push forward democratic decision-making.