Organizational Learning

Several different approaches to organizational learning and change, as well as considerations concerning the management of employee issues during change processes will be discussed. However, these approaches differ considerably in addressing the subject of learning and knowledge, which necessitates a clear distinction between these concepts. In addition, internationalization of companies leads to opportunities for and constraints of organizational learning. The course will therefore also discuss an approach to the management of subsidiaries in different countries.

This course  will consist of the presentation of concepts of organizational learning and the discussion of practical cases. As far as its content is concerned, this course aims at exploring the different ways in which organizations learn from past experiences and change themselves accordingly. Since decisions on important organizational changes can be undertaken successfully only if the organizational members are willing and able to learn from prior experiences they need to overcome their (quite natural) resistance to change. 

In presenza

The course consists of different kinds of sessions: lectures and discussions on theoretical foundations and discussion of business cases. The business cases are connected to the preceding lectures, however, in most cases, not fully. After some of these class discussions. I will upload questions on the cases that the students have to answer and that are related to the class discussions. These answers will be graded. However, not all case discussions will be followed by questions that the students have to answer. We will also have videos to discuss and a simulation study.

You will usually have about 6 days to answer the questions. In any case, the respective deadlines will be indicated on the course’s icorsi-website. It is necessary that students prepare the case discussion sessions. This means, in effect, that students read the cases carefully, show up at the case sessions and participate in the discussions. However, there will be no out-of-class group work with respect to answering the questions. This means that each student has to answer the questions alone!

There will be one final exam which will address everything that has been done in class, i.e. lectures and case discussions.

The grading system will be as follows:

Cases: 40%

Exam: 60% 

Readings, especially business cases will be provided. Other literature, slides of the lecture as well as business case questions can be found at: http://corsi.elearninglab.org/