Senge’s Five Disciplines and Organizational Climate Paper
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Senge’s Five Disciplines and Organizational Climate Paper
Continuous learning is vital for the development of any organization. However, enhancing organizational learning by creating a supportive environment is still a challenge. Consequently, Senge has put forward five disciplines of learning organizations to address this challenge (Hoe, 2019). This paper will discuss Senge’s five disciplines of learning organizations and relate them to an Organizational Climate that Supports Organizational Learning for a better understanding.
Senge’s Five Disciplines
Senge’s five disciplines of learning organizations help guide the development and success of an organization and describe how employees put the extra effort to achieve beyond the organizational expectations. The five disciplines that Senge recommends include Building a Shared vision, Systems Thinking, Mental Models, Team Learning, and Personal Mastery (Hoe, 2019). Building a Shared vision is necessary to push people to perform their duties because they want to instead of being forced to. This encourages learning and excellence.
Personal mastery entails continuous clarification and expansion of personal vision, building an objective focus on reality, developing patience, and making appropriate efforts at an individual level. Mental models describe the factors that shape how people perceive the world and act, such as ingrained pictures of images, generalizations, and assumptions. Team learning describes a collective way of thinking and acceptance of lack of knowledge to enable every member to suspend assumptions and embrace dialogue. Systems thinking is the Fifth Discipline that integrates the other four into a coherent body of theory and practice (Hoe, 2019).
Characteristics of an Organizational Climate that Support Organizational Learning
An organizational climate entails factors that directly and indirectly influence the behaviors and motivations of people within the organizational environment (Caniëls & Baaten, 2019). For these factors to support organizational learning, Hutasuhut, Adruce, & Jonathan (2021) reports that such as environment should embrace a culture of rewarding people for good performance and minimizing conflict as much as possible to enhance continuous learning. Secondly, the environment should be warm and supportive in that people are not judged for admitting a lack of knowledge (Caniëls & Baaten, 2019). Such traits promote respect, trust, communication, and feedback to enhance inquiry and dialogue learning.
How Organizational Climate and Senge’s Disciplines are Related to Organizational Learning
As Hutasuhut, Adruce, & Jonathan (2021) describes, organizational climate defines the primary factors that can motivate people or push them to behave in a particular manner. By extension, these factors that ensure an organization supports organizational learning are not exempted. This property of enhancing organizational learning by creating a conducive environment connects an organizational climate to Senge’s disciplines because Senge also highlights the effective ways to support organizational learning. For instance, team learning, as described by Senge ensures that everybody within an organization is ready to learn and admits a lack of knowledge. Hutasuhut, Adruce, & Jonathan (2021) also encourages warmth and supportiveness to ensure that everyone is welcomed and encouraged to seek knowledge. However, lack of reward still challenges organizational climate and impedes the transfer of training or learning because people want their improvement and continued education to be rewarded and recognized by promotions, pay increments, and so on to motivate them (Hutasuhut, Adruce, & Jonathan, 2021).
All organizations should ensure continuous learning for better development. Senge has proposed effective ways to ensure this. Organizations should learn about these disciplines and implement them whenever necessary. They must also ensure to create an Organizational Climate that Supports Organizational Learning as discussed in the paper.
References
Caniëls, M. C., & Baaten, S. M. (2019). How a learning-oriented organizational climate is linked to different proactive behaviors: The role of employee resilience. Social Indicators Research, 143(2), 561-577. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-018-1996-y
Hoe, S. L. (2019). Digitalization in practice: the fifth discipline advantage. The learning organization. Vol. 27 No. 1, pp. 54-64. https://doi.org/10.1108/TLO-09-2019-0137
Hutasuhut, I., Adruce, S. A. Z., & Jonathan, V. (2021). How a learning organization cultivates self-directed learning. Journal of Workplace Learning. Vol. 33 No. 5, pp. 334-347. https://doi.org/10.1108/JWL-05-2020-0074