Abstract:

This research aims to study the role that learning organizations may have on organizational performance in Portuguese higher education institutions (HEI), through a literature review that supports the presentation of a conceptual model proposed by the authors.

The survival of HEI depends on how these institutions accept change, improve their practices and react to competitiveness. Nowadays, the most relevant aspects of education in higher education are translated by learning, dynamic structures, flexibility and quality. Consequently, the higher education system will have to adapt to the continuous changes and new requirements, in order to achieve the success and the proposed objectives. Thus, in order to differentiate themselves from their competitors, organizations must develop their resources, promoting the creation of knowledge and the dissemination of information.

Learning organizations can be defined as organizations that facilitate the learning of all of their elements, assuming themselves as learning entities that have certain characteristics to meet the changing needs of the environment. Currently, HEI suffer great pressure to create significant learning environments, this is, learning spaces that can fully train their students, based on educational projects that take on and respond to the growing cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity of students, their families and their teachers (Husu & Tirri, 2007; Mucharreira, 2017). An educational organization that intends to establish itself as a learning organization will have to take into account multiple dimensions, such as the individual behavior of different educational agents, teamwork and organizational culture, structured and fostered by factors such as trust, time, technology and joint reflection (OECD, 2016). Learning organizations will be able to follow developments and improvements in the business environment to perform their actions successfully. Thus, one of the key goals of HEI is to achieve academic excellence among students, and as such, need to transform into learning organizations and subsequently improve the overall performance of the organization.

Organizational performance, on the other hand, has proved to be a difficult concept to define and even measure (Erbisch, 2004). Among the existing studies about the performance, is possible to state that there isn’t a single criterion for defining the performance, which makes difficult to measure or compare the results. To overcome this ambiguity concerning the performance criterion, in this research will be considered three perspectives of performance, namely, financial, operational, and market performance. Regarding the methodology, the data will be obtained through a questionnaire in order to evaluate the different dimensions of the proposed conceptual model. The sample will consist of about 200 emails from members of the management boards of Portuguese HEI. In the treatment of quantitative data, a model of structural equations (SEM) will be used, in order to investigate the possible relations between the different dimensions incorporated in the model. In terms of discussion of results, it is intended to characterize the relationship between the concept of learning organizations and performance in Portuguese HEI.

Keywords:

Higher Education, Learning Organizations, Organizational Performance.