The Impact Of Corporate University Function On Organizational Learning Capability

Corporate university, a new type of organization was born in1927for the establishment of GM Design and Management College. The world famous multinational companies established their corporate universities in China following the step of Motorola. Chinese domestic corporate university started from Chunlan College in1993. By the end of2012, there were nearly1200corporate universities took on tens of millions of employees’training and capacity development in China. But there are also some misunderstandings in the development of the Chinese domestic corporate universities, lacking of clear thinking of the corporate university function.Organizational learning theory has been hot since1990s. There is growing recognition that the ability to learn faster and better than the competition is the only competitiveness for enterprise’s sustainable development. To established a learning organization has been popular since<The fifth discipline:the art and practice of the learning organization> written by Peter M. Senge published in1990. But after years of development, learning organization recognized worldwide is still rare.It can be found from organizational learning literatures that those learning organizations recognized in the world has built their own corporate universities which play a unique role in promoting the companies to achieve their strategic objectives. But so far, whether the establishment of corporate university is able to directly affect the organizational learning capability is still not be mentioned by scholars. Therefore, this paper will be focused on the following two issues:First, what functions does the corporate university have? How to measure them?Second, whether the corporate university function is able to affect the organizational learning capability?In this paper, the evaluations of corporate university function and organizational learning capability will base on employee’s personal perception.The scale of corporate university function contains6dimensions(22items): talent training, culture spread, knowledge management platform construction, training resources integration, enterprise ecological system construction and strategy support; The scale of organizational learning capability contains4dimensions(16items):management commitment, system views, open and test and knowledge transfer and integration.XX Group Company with nearly10years experience in operating a corporate university which has9branches belong to9different industries is selected as investigated object.With SPSS17.0and LISREL8.7used as two pieces of statistical software, the conclusions of this study are:there is a significant positive correlation between the overall function of corporate university and organizational learning capability and there is a positive correlation between each dimension of corporate university function and organizational learning capability.This paper should be improved in the following aspects:First, more objective method may be used to measure corporate university function and organizational learning capability. Second, more sample data and possible adjustment variables are used for further analysis. Third, several years of follow-up study is necessary.