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PETER SENGE'S LEARNING ORGANIZATION: A CRITICAL VIEW AND THE ADDITION OF SOME NEW CONCEPTS TO ACTUALIZE THEORY AND PRACTICE
Abstract (summary)
Since few decades we are living in a world characterized by a more and more accelerated shift of change. Indeed, "our environments are more and more complex, more and more interdependent, more and more fleeting, more and more unstable, and more and more unforeseeable. In addition, this shift of change of growing complexity is continually accelerating. Thus, this new context continually requires greater capabilities of adaptation, relegating to us the responsibility of our learning, and it is asking for the creation of a culture of continuous change and learning." (Lapointe, 1998, p. 2) Trying to reach this objective, in 1987, Peter Senge and a team of researchers at the Sloan School of Management of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) suggested a new organizational culture of continuous change and learning or, in other words, to build learning organizations, organizations which are capable to generate and share knowledge. Senge's view of building learning organizations is articulated around five fundamental disciplines: systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning. In this paper, we discuss about the learning organization and the organizational learning, we bring a critical view of the learning organization, such as proposed by Senge, and we suggest the addition of two new concepts (e.g., knowledge generation and sharing, and organizational behavior) to those integrated into the Senge's five core disciplines in order to help actualize the learning organization theory and practice, and to perform a better management of the individual and organizational knowledge and the organizational behavior of people within the enterprises.