Is Yours a Learning Organization?

David A. Garvin; Amy C. Edmondson; Francesca  Gino

Article | Harvard Business Review | March 2008

Is Yours a Learning Organization?

by David A. Garvin, Amy C. Edmondson and Francesca Gino

Abstract

This article includes a one-page preview that quickly summarizes the key ideas and provides an overview of how the concepts work in practice along with suggestions for further reading. An organization with a strong learning culture faces the unpredictable deftly. However, a concrete method for understanding precisely how an institution learns and for identifying specific steps to help it learn better has remained elusive. A new survey instrument from professors Garvin and Edmondson of Harvard Business School and assistant professor Gino of Carnegie Mellon University allows you to ground your efforts in becoming a learning organization. The tool's conceptual foundation is what the authors call the three building blocks of a learning organization. The first, a supportive learning environment, comprises psychological safety, appreciation of differences, openness to new ideas, and time for reflection. The second, concrete learning processes and practices, includes experimentation, information collection and analysis, and education and training. These two complementary elements are fortified by the final building block: leadership that reinforces learning. The survey instrument enables a granular examination of all these particulars, scores each of them, and provides a framework for detailed, comparative analysis. You can make comparisons within and among your institution's functional areas, between your organization and others, and against benchmarks that the authors have derived from their surveys of hundreds of executives in many industries. After discussing how to use their tool, the authors share the insights they acquired as they developed it. Above all, they emphasize the importance of dialogue and diagnosis as you nurture your company and its processes with the aim of becoming a learning organization. The authors' goal—and the purpose of their tool—is to help you paint an honest picture of your firm's learning culture and of the leaders who set its tone.

Keywords: Interpersonal Communication; Learning; Surveys; Leading Change; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Organizational Culture;

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Citation:

Garvin, David A., Amy C. Edmondson, and Francesca Gino. "Is Yours a Learning Organization?" Harvard Business Review 86, no. 3 (March 2008): 109–116.

By 2013, the U.S. wireless industry was in the midst of a costly transition. As consumers began to embrace more sophisticated mobile devices, the industry's four main players spent heavily to improve their infrastructures for providing reliable high-speed data services. T-Mobile, the smallest of the four major carriers, lacked the scale of its competitors and risked falling further behind in the contest for market share. Faced with this daunting business environment, T-Mobile's new CEO declared war on the rest of the industry, decrying competitor pricing practices and upending the traditional contract-based business model. This case provides background information on the state of the wireless industry in 2013 and follows T-Mobile's early steps to transform its market position.

Article | Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

Conversational Receptiveness: Expressing Engagement with Opposing Views

M. Yeomans, J. Minson, H. Collins, H. Chen and F. Gino

We examine “conversational receptiveness”—the use of language to communicate one’s willingness to thoughtfully engage with opposing views. We develop an interpretable machine-learning algorithm to identify the linguistic profile of receptiveness (Studies 1A-B). We then show that in contentious policy discussions, government executives who were rated as more receptive—according to our algorithm and their partners but not their own self-evaluations—were considered better teammates, advisors, and workplace representatives (Study 2). Furthermore, using field data from a setting where conflict management is endemic to productivity, we show that conversational receptiveness at the beginning of a conversation forestalls conflict escalation at the end. Specifically, Wikipedia editors who write more receptive posts are less prone to receiving personal attacks from disagreeing editors (Study 3). We develop a “receptiveness recipe” intervention based on our algorithm. We find that writers who follow the recipe are seen as more desirable partners for future collaboration and their messages are seen as more persuasive (Study 4). Overall, we find that conversational receptiveness is reliably measurable, has meaningful relational consequences, and can be substantially improved using our intervention.

Keywords: receptiveness; natural language processing; disagreement; Interpersonal Communication; Relationships; Conflict Management;

Citation:

Yeomans, M., J. Minson, H. Collins, H. Chen, and F. Gino. "Conversational Receptiveness: Expressing Engagement with Opposing Views." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 160 (September 2020): 131–148. View Details

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Social exclusion is a painful yet common experience in many people’s personal and professional lives. This research demonstrates that feeling authentic serves as a buffer against social rejection, leading people to experience less social pain. Across five studies, using different manipulations of authenticity, different paradigms to create social exclusion, and different measures of feeling rejected, we found that experiencing authenticity led participants to appraise situations as less threatening and to experience lower feelings of rejection from the social exclusion. We also found that perceived threat explains these effects. Our findings suggest that authenticity may be an underused resource for people who perceive themselves to be, or actually are, socially excluded or ostracized. This research has diverse and important implications: Interventions that increase authenticity could be used to reduce perceptions of threatening situations and the pain of impending exclusion episodes in situations ranging from adjustment to college to organizational orientation programs.

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