Management International Conference 2009

Posted on by Miha Škerlavaj

I’m off to Tunisia, where I’ll be presenting a paper at the Management International Conference 2009 (Sousse). The paper is result of a collaboration with a colleague Jesús David Sánchez de Pablo González del Campo, University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). It is titled The Organizational Learning Process as Facilitator of Innovativeness. Below is the abstract:

Due to the relevance of innovativeness in the competitiveness and survival of a company in a constantly changing environment, we have questioned about how to facilitate innovativeness in organizations. Some recent literature presents organizational learning process as the key factor in order for innovation to occur. For this reason, we have tried to analyze the influence of organizational learning process on innovativeness using the partial least square (PLS) approach to structural equation modeling on data from 107 Spanish companies. We understand innovativeness as a combination of innovative culture and product/service and process innovation. Moreover, we have defined organizational learning as a continuous process with four phases. All of them must get to a high importance if firm wants to reach their aims with regard to innovation because the results of our research confirm a positive and significant relation between organizational learning and innovativeness as well as previous researches.

Exploratory study of organizational learning network within a Spanish high-tech company

Posted on by Miha Škerlavaj

efrizbornikMy research efforts related to studying organizational learning networks are becoming more and more international. This time we published a paper together with Spanish colleagues from University of Castilla-La Mancha. The paper citation is Sánchez de Pablo González del Campo, Jesús David; Guadamillas Gómez, Fátima; Dimovski, Vlado; Škerlavaj, Miha (2008): Exploratory Study of Organizational Learning Network in a Spanish High-tech Company, Proceedings of Rijeka Faculty of Economics – Journal of Economics and Business, 26(2): 257-277.

Here is the abstract:

The paper presents an exploratory study of the intra-organizational learning network in the context of a Spanish high-tech company. It expands the generalization of the network perspective to intra-organizational learning. Based on an exploratory social network analysis, we formulated four propositions that will be developed and contrasted in a later confirmatory study. First, the exploratory analysis demonstrates the importance of industry experience and tenure within the company as a common denominator of most central employees within learning networks. Second, similarity in terms of experiential level breeds mutual learning. Third, complementarity of knowledge is important for the formation of learning ties. Fourth, physical proximity creates opportunities to learn. Future research will need to test these four propositions in a confirmatory study.

Proceedings of Rijeka Faculty of Economics – Journal of Economics and Business is a new SSCI ranked journal (indexed since July, 31 2008).