Enhancing Learning Programs in Public Organizations: The Role of Organizational Learning Capability

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Abstract: - Public organizations provide training to enhance their employee’s capabilities to provide better
services. Public organizations use different learning methods to enhance their employee’s skills and service
offering. Therefore, public organizations are considering different learning programs such as classroom
training, coaching, mentoring etc. For the organizations to be effective in providing the learning programs to
their employees, there is a need to have an approach to support these efforts. This study suggests that
Organizational Learning Capability (OLC) is the right approach to do that. This is because OLC facilitates the
learning process. The study proposes an OLC model consists of the key elements that represent the definition of
OLC; these are the learning processes, enablers, influential factors. This paper explores how organizations can
bridge the gap between investments in learning initiatives and improvement in service provision in public
organizations. The context of this study is the creation of a set of learning and development programs in the
public services organizations. The top OLC model helps to define all other learning programs where the
coaching learning program is presented in this paper.
Key-Words: - Organisational Learning capability, Learning programmes, Public services
organisations, Coaching learning programme, Learning process in organisations
Received:
1 Introduction
The advent of new digital technologies and
the gig economy present an opportunity for
revisiting the way learning programmes are
conducted. Organisations invest massively in
learning programmes to upskill human talent and
improve service offering. In 2016, $359 billion was
spent globally (Borzykowski, 2017). However, these
investments usually lack the expected impact on
service performance: three quarters of managers and
employees are dissatisfied and lack the required
skill to do their jobs (Glaveski 2019). Organisations
are considering digital technologies to address these
challenges, but, without the right deployment
strategy, they risk committing the same mistakes
and using technology for waste automation (Holweg
et al. 2018). Thus, adopting digital technologies to
deliver impactful and cost-effective learning
programmes requires an aligned deployment
framework that account for the challenges digital
technologies pose to learning, including employees’
difficulty to undertake and complete training
(Edmondson 2012).
The context of this study is the creation of a
set of learning programmes in public sector
organisations. The authors built a mixed-methods
field study focusing on coaching learning programs.
Data were collected and analysed during three
phases. First, the theoretical foundations of OLC
were reviewed, recording different key factors.
Second, semi-structured interviews were conducted
with multiple experienced participants across
industrial sectors in Europe and UAE to capture
their perspectives of the organisational learning
programs enablers and challenges. Third, findings
from the previous two phases were reconciled to
produce a model for OLC which includes a detailed
analysis of the role that digital technologies play in
enabling the organisational learning.
2 Problem Formulation
This paper explores how organisations can
bridge the gap between investments in learning
programmes and service performance in public
sector organisations. The author adopts an
organisational learning capability (OLC) perspective
to study what strategic enablers and influential
factors affecting the link between digital
technologies and organisational learning. OLC
emphasises on the ability of organisations to acquire

and translate knowledge from external sources,
operations, experiences and initiatives into
improvement changes (Leonard Barton 1992,
Popper and Lipshitz 1998).
2.1
Exploring OLC has the potential to highlight a
distinctive framework that advantage technological
investments in learning.
2.1.1
OLC addresses the individual, group and
organizational levels to realize the management
goals (Crossan, Lane, and White 1999, Goh 2003,
Lawrence et al. 2005).
3 Problem Solution
The Organizational Learning Capabilities
Research on organizational learning has focused
on the “change in the organization that occurs
as the organization acquires experience”
(Argote and Miron-Spektor 2011: 1124), from
at least three perspectives: behavioral,
knowledge and systems. Behavioral researchers
have compared concepts from individual
learning to organizational learning, highlighting
the role of bounded rationality and the
challenges of learning under uncertainty (March
and Olsen 1975, Levinthal and March 1993,
Simon 1991). Organizational learning
researchers focused on understanding the role
of knowledge in learning Finally, researchers
took a learning systems angle, finding
management practices that foster organizational
learning (Senge 2006, Örtenblad 2007, Back
2012, Caldwell 2012a, 2012b, Shrivastava
1983).
Barton (1992) operationalizes OLC as an
organization’s ability to acquire and translate
knowledge from external sources, operations,
experiences and initiatives into improvement
changes at the individual, group and
organizational level to realize the management
goals. While research on organizational
learning argues that learning causes myopia,
prevents innovation and causes structural
rigidity (Levinthal and March 1993, March and
Olsen 1975, Simon 1991), OLC provides an
alternative vantage point to analyses those
challenges. It argues that some organizational
structures, processes and values can become
enablers and influential factors for innovation
and adaptation and improvements. (Jiménez-
Jiménez and Sans-Valle 2011, Alegre and
Chiva 2008).
Enablers of the Organizational Learning
Capability
Different opinions about organizational learning
enablers can be broadly classified in acquire
and capture knowledge enablers, which allow
the organization to grab learning experiences
from its employees, associates, competitors and
the environment and establish a mode of
documentation (DiBella, Nevis, and Gould
1996); translate knowledge enablers, which
transform knowledge sources into learning and
integrate it across the organization, including
dissemination mode, and skill development
(DiBella, Nevis, and Gould 1996, Jerez-Gómez,
Céspedes-Lorente, and Valle-Cabrera 2005,
Goh 2003); realize management goals enablers,
which promote common mental models (e.g.
mission and vision) (Senge 1990, Goh 2003),
and reward systems (Goh 2003). Finally,
systemic change enablers such as those that
focus on leadership commitment, empowerment
and experimentation (Goh 2003, Jerez-Gómez,
Céspedes-Lorente, and Valle-Cabrera 2005,
Jerez Gómez, Céspedes Lorente, and Valle
Cabrera 2004, García-Morales, Jiménez-
Barrionuevo, and Gutiérrez-Gutiérrez 2012,
Moghadam et al. 2013). Table 1 present an
example of enablers considered in this study.
Table 1 present OLC enablers that are identified
from the reviewed literature.

Table 1 Enablers of organizational learning
Facilitating Factors for Implementation of OLC
Facilitating factors describe the “organizational
and managerial characteristics or factors that
facilitate the organizational learning process or
allow an organization to learn” (Goh and
Richards 1997: 577). Some studies referred to
facilitating factors as the dimensions of learning
and have been used as components of
instruments to measure learning. These
dimensions are derived from both the Learning
Organization literature (c.f. Hult and Ferrell
1997), and the Organizational Learning (c.f.
Chiva-Gómez 2004, Chiva, Alegre, and
Lapiedra 2007), (Chiva, Alegre, and Lapiedra
2007). A summary of the facilitating factors is
presented below:
Table 2 Factors that facilitate learning in
organization
Digitalization of learning process
Recently, digital innovations have blossomed
due to progress in infrastructure and algorithms,
and emergence of a new generation of digital
savvies. This innovation has profound
implications for corporate management and
learning (Noruzy et al. 2013, Khin and Ho
2019, Szalavetz 2019, Schweitzer, Hand rich,
and Heidenreich 2018, Ylijoki and Porras 2016,
Camisón and Villar-López 2014, Laurell et al.
2020). Three mechanisms are to note:
improving structural performance, (cost-related
efficiency gains), enhancing relational
performance (collaboration quality across
different teams) and promoting new product
development performance (Schweitzer,
Handrich, and Heidenreich 2018). Performance
benefits are only achieved if the appropriate
conditions exist; an integrated development
environment and other tactics need to be in
place to reduce the risk of derailing innovation
practices (Szalavetz 2019).
Researchers found the use of digital platforms
for education can benefit multiple dimensions
of learning programs through; ease of access to
knowledge, emergence of a massive open
online courses, integration with industries,
global mobility of learners, competitive
landscape, objectivity of assessment, and time

dedicated per instructor. (Wildan Zulfikar et al.
2018, Sánchez et al. 2019).
For digital technologies to deliver,
organizations need to align digital innovation
with corporate goals, foster the right
organizational culture, build talent/roles with
the right skills on the effective appropriation of
digital instruments (Caputo et al. 2019, Vial
2019), and get leadership buy-in (Muninger,
Hammedi, and Mahr 2019, Vial 2019).
However, these digitalisation enablers have not
been integrated with the application of learning
programs. Two gaps are addressed; 1) a need
for a well-defined OLC model to help
organizations introduce and implement learning
programs cost-effectively. 2) Most of the papers
have not addressed comprehensively compiling
the facilitating factors of learning process in
organizations.
Research design and methodology
This study seeks to gain a better understanding
of the learning practices in public sector to
support the development of an OLC model that
encourages learning culture activities, utilising
digital technology to enhance performance and
service offering. A structured interview
protocol using face to face and video meetings
was used to collect data. The protocol covered
key aspects mentioned in the literature
including learning processes, enablers,
influential factors and digital enabling
technology. The study interviewed 37
employees from 30 public sector organisations
from seven countries. The sample, shown in
Table 3, includes managers in healthcare,
education, social care, local authorities and law
enforcement sectors.
Table 1 Field study participants
Data analysis
we rated organisation using a 1-5 Likert scale
where higher scores indicate greater
effectiveness and/or adoption on 4 areas:
learning processes, enablers, facilitating factors,
and challenges in adopting digitally enabled
learning processes. The same measurement
applied to the frequency wherever it occurred.
Data were filtered to include only inputs with
an average effectiveness above 3.
Figure 1 shows that public service
organisations are performing all the needed
tasks to conduct any learning programme.
Designing, evaluation of the learning
programmes and the evaluation of the gained
knowledge tasks are less effective which should
be considered in the final model.
Figure 1 – Tasks performed to conduct
learning programme in organisations
Figure 2 summarise the key learning
facilitating factors in public sector ranked by
importance according to the interviewees.
These factors are important to support the