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Organizational Learning in Smaller Manufacturing Firms

David P. Spicer

Bradford University School of Management, UK

Eugene Sadler-Smith

School of Management, University of Surrey, UK

This article describes the development and validation of a measure of a firm's organizational learning orientation and considers the relationships between this and firm performance. The measure assesses owner-managers’ perceptions of their organizations’ orientation to learning in terms of higherorder (active) and lower-order (passive) levels of learning. Its development is a response to the criticisms that organizational learning research is beset by a paucity of valid and reliable measures to assess the ways in which organizations engage in learning at the collective level (Tsang, 1997). Data are presented from a number of samples of small- and medium-sized enterprises in the UK that indicate that the organizational learning orientation measure exhibits acceptable reliability and validity. Furthermore, a number of relationships between organizational learning and financial and non-financial performance were observed. The implications of the findings for research, policy and the management of learning within organizations are discussed.

Key Words: firm performance • learning orientation • manufacturing • organizational learning • small firms • SMEs

International Small Business Journal, Vol. 24, No. 2, 133-158 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0266242606061836


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