Learning Organization In New Economy

Environment is nowadays characterized by permanent change and growing complexity. Flexibility and lifelong learning are required for success in such environment for individuals and for organizations as well. Learning organization is defined as organizations that have implemented structure, processes and organizational culture that continuously foster individual, team and organizational learning and which results with permanent changes in behaviour and organizational processes. Learning organization is not new subject of research and it is not unknown to managers. In order to enable development of learning organization, many authors have developed concepts and defi ned specific activities that can help management in achieving the goal of creating and measuring learning organization in their companies. In this paper we describe several of these constructs with emphasis on Building Blocks of Learning Organization, created by David A. Garvin, Amy C. Edmondson and Francesca Gino. Based on this construction we wanted to test if Croatian companies are dedicated to implementation and development of learning organizations. We have conducted a research on a convenient sample and it showed that Croatian companies fall behind on implementation of learning organization. The results of this research may serve as guidelines for decision makers who want to improve learning processes within their organization.