Organizational Learning And Firm Performance In Dynamic Environments

Immense changes in the business environment have been caused by the rapid development of globalization and technology. Researchers, academicians and firm leaders have stated that organizational learning (OL) or organizational knowledge is perhaps the most important strategic resource for firm to win competitive advantages in dynamic environment. It is of value to society to find how organizational learning improves firm performance (FP). This dissertation reviews past literature, develops a conceptual model involving environmental dynamics (ED), OL, and FP, and develops measures to test hypotheses in the model.The principal research questions in this dissertation are: (1) how OL affects FP, (2) how ED moderates the relationships between OL and FP, and (3) what are the implications of the studies about (1) and (2) questions? In order to fulfill the research, we firstly measured OL by knowledge acquisition (KA), information dissemination (ID), information interpretation (II), and organizational memory (OM), and ED by technological and market dynamics.In this dissertation, questionnaire was used as research instrument during the data collecting. We sent out altogether 220 questionnaires to firms in Zhejiang province and got back 119. The ratio of callback of valid questionnaire is 54.09%. Sample firms are related to industry of electron, software, pharmacy, machinery, and etc. Firm scale (enrollment capital represented) in samples ranges from hundreds of thousand to tens of billion RMB. During the data processing, we mainly used explorative factor analysis, multiple linear regression, and z statistical test to verify hypotheses in the model. After quantitative analyses and theoretical exploration, some important results and conclusions are as below:(1) ED not regarded, both KA and ID are significantly positive to FP (both significant levels are lower than 0.01), but II and OM do not significantly contribute to FP. The moderation effects of ED on the relationships between OL and FP truly exist: the higher the technological or market dynamics, the more the marginal contribution of KA, ID, and OM to FP(significant levels are all lower than 0.01).(2) Today, China firms mainly rely on customers, suppliers, Internet, and etc for acquiring knowledge, but the knowledge support of universities has not yet exhibited. In the methods of firm knowledge sharing and communication,traditional methods such as group meetings and formal channels for information transfer, hold the leading positions, but untraditional ones, for examples, Intranet and informal relations among employees take up subordinate places. So, for the sake of fully utilizing all kinds of methods to gain knowledge, firms should strength OL by universities and informal methods.(3) Because of existing moderation effects of ED, we infer that with ED developing, schools related to OL, such as learning school, cognition schools, and environment school, will play crucial roles during the strategy forming. For the same reason, dynamic capabilities based on OL are becoming the most important strategy theory about competitive advantages in dynamic environment. In addition, the relationships between OL and catching-up were investigated in terms of the moderation effects. The requirements of OL are diverse at different stage in technological life cycle because of changing ED. Considering the weak capabilities of OL, in earlier phase latecomers should take advantage of opportunity windows of mature stage entrance to start catching-up. But, with capabilities of OL increasing, latecomers should gradually transfer to the other opportunity windows of chaos stage entrance to leapfrog.