Abstract:

Context:
In the age of instability where things are complex and rapidly changing, organizational learning and its strategic management are key for gaining a competitive advantage. Individuals and organizations need to be continuously learning — and fast — that is, need to be agile and dynamic learners (Aspin et al., 2001; Matthews, 2013).

Purpose:
This paper contributes to the theoretical gap of “How do organizations make the transition to become a learning organization?” (Tuggle, 2016, p. 456). This has been done focusing on making tangible the fundaments of a concrete Organizational Learning Structure (OLS), an Agile Development & High-Performance Ecosystem (AD&HP Ecosystem). This is an OLS that contributes to the organization’s competitive advantage by pursuing the agile development and high-performance of its workforce through formal and informal learning activities for individual, team, and organizational learning. This is the research question being addressed: “How does a Participatory Action Research contribute to deliberately changing the design of an OLS?”

Methodology:
Making a change entails action and, from the researcher’s standpoint, it demands a responsive and flexible approach. Given these circumstances, Action Research was considered the most suitable methodology. The methodology we employed was Participatory Action Research (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2005) for Organizational Development (Coghlan, 2019; Lewin, 1946) following a qualitative research approach. We implemented three intervention cycles of action and reflection (Coghlan & Brannick, 2014) in two enterprises located in the Basque Country; first to diagnose their current OLS; the second cycle defined the foundations of their new OLS with the active participation of various people from the organization and the third cycle initiated the creation of the newly-designed OLS. The data has mainly been gathered through semi-structured interviews and direct observation supported by a reflective journal kept by the researcher. The results were analyzed through explanation building, logic-model analysis, and a cross-case analysis.

Results:
“The Participatory Action Research carried out with the active participation of the enterprises has been successful for deliberately changing the design of the OLS.” It has been useful for co-defining the foundations of a new OLS for both enterprises actively participating in this research. Furthermore, the process that was suggested for designing the new OLS was successful, albeit with some improvable aspects.

Keywords:

Learning organizations, learning &amp, development, agile development, performance support, action research, workplace learning.