Diagnosing learning in project organizations

Organizations are today making considerable efforts to become learning organizations, skilled in creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and in modifying their behavior to reflect their new knowledge and skill. Project organizations are faced with the learning issue both within and across projects. A diagnostic tool was developed to help managers to identify organizational learning procedures. Factor analysis performed on the new diagnostic questionnaire revealed 3 factors: knowledge creation, information diffusion and attributed importance of organizational knowledge. Organizations included in the research sample were characterized according to the three factors. It should be noted that managers' evaluation of the three factors were quite moderate. They believed that, in general, routines did not have great impact on their organizational life, and that their organization had a relatively long way to go with respect to its processes of knowledge creation as well as information diffusion.