Organizational Learning Rate Dependence on National Wealth: Case Study of Business Schools

Globalization presents new challenges to business schools: all of them are rivals in the global market. In order to look for better opportunities to survive in growing competition it is needed to be a learning organization which helps to increase the competitive advantage of the business school. Business schools worldwide are facing unequal situations economically, since their operating environments vary largely in terms of economic welfare. The research seeks to clear up whether the prosperity of the business school's location country provides an advantage to the school, which is indirectly revealed in a higher organizational learning rate or whether a smaller GDP per capita in the location country is an obstacle to the school's development. The paper investigates the dependence of business schools' (BS) organizational learning rate (LR) on GDP per capita of the school's country of location. The authors used an instrument invented by them for measuring the BS learning rate. The structure of the instrument is based on Watkins and Marsick's learning organization questionnaire, but it takes into consideration the specific features of BS. The measuring instrument consists of three levels, which in turn are divided into 7 dimensions and 45 characteristics addressing all learning aspects of BS as organizations. They measured the organizational learning rates of 105 BSs from 44 countries. To identify the dependence between the BS LR and the school's location country they conducted a regression analysis for average LR as well as separately for individual components of learning (levels, dimensions, characteristics). The results of the analysis reveal that the dependence of BS' average LR on GDP per capita of the school's location country is not statistically significant. However, they identified a negative correlation between the rates of individual BS learning components and GDP per capita of the school's location country. Additionally they investigated dependence of the possession of international accreditations awarded to BSs that show organizational quality (EQUIS, AACSB) on GDP per capita of the school's location country. Here the analysis shows a strong positive correlation.