An integrated model for learning organization with strategic view: Benchmarking in the knowledge-intensive industry

Facing such a fast-changing environment, an organization should be more market-driven and learning-oriented. It is believed that a learning organization (LO) is apt to develop and maintain its own competitiveness rather than that without learning ability. Even though many studies have been addressing the importance of LO and the plausible relationship with competitiveness, the incoming impacts of knowledge have force them to focus attentions on knowledge-intensive industry (KII). Managing change is the high priority for continuing education institutes (CEIs), one of KII in Taiwan, coping simultaneously with diversified market needs and limited resources. Prior literatures, however, concerned with strategy-performance relationship have been oversimplified the contextual effects. Therefore, this study decides to develop a conceptual framework with an adaptation of Prajogo and Sohal's model to describe the missing linkage in context of environment-strategy-performance (ESP). To serve as benchmarking, we further introduce an integrated model named 'the Learning Organization Pyramid' (LOP) for facilitating a good understanding of LO and CE system. This study finally concludes that a LO would be the best solution for KII to bridge the gap in terms of system planning. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.