Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective

by Chris Argyris, Donald A. Schon

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

Genres: Business, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Chris Argyris is a director of elite strategy consulting firm, the Monitor Group, and is the James Bryant Conant Professor of Education and Organizational Behavior at Harvard Business School.

Agyris's early research focused on the unintended consequences for individuals of formal organizational structures, executive leadership, control systems, and management information systems, and on how individuals adapted to change those consequences. He then turned his attention to ways of changing organizations, especially the behavior of executives at the upper levels of organization.

During the past decade, Argyris has been developing, a theory of individual and organizational learning in which human reasoning (not just behavior) becomes the basis for diagnosis and action.

Reviews

[Shymaa Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not my favorite OL book, but it helped a lot.

[Yulia Vasyliv · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book gives a great overview of the organizational dynamics, specifically how defensive routines and overcoming mistakes and challenges influence the collaboration and success within a team and how to transform defensive approach into organizational learning. Book has a number of case-examples, analysis, and strategies to tackle challenges.

"A theory-of-action perspective would question the theory of intervention. It would maintain that if: (1) the research team were able to generate the appropriate concepts, frames of references, and languages; and (2) it transmitted these accurately; and (3) the clients accepted them, then all this would mean that learning occurred at the level of espoused theory. The transformation of this newly learned espoused theory to the level of theory-in-use is an enormous problem which has yet to be faced. If the members of the organization could be reeducated so that they could overcome the problems mentioned above, then they would be able to use the discrepancies between organizational espoused theories and theories-in-use as a vehicle to develop a more general model how organization can discover when it makes errors and how to correct them; or better yet to help the organization to discover when it is not able to discover that it is making errors".

[Denise Mitnick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Changes the way leaders communicate, teach and learn; a precursor of Senge's work.