Organizational Learning Orientation and Sustainable Competitive Advantage: Towards More Accountable Government-Linked Companies

Government-Linked Companies (GLCs) are expected to show competitive performance in order to reflect the accountability of taxpayers’ money. Therefore, this study is an attempt to assess the status of the current level of organizational learning orientation among the Government-Linked Companies (GLCs) in Malaysia. This study collected primary data based on a set of questionnaire survey among 134 executives and managers of GLCs in Malaysia. The data were collected based on opinions of the ten factors of organizational learning practices by using the five-point Likert scale. The data were analysed using descriptive statistics. Further, the reliability of the data was tested using Cronbach’s alpha test, the validity of the data was tested by checking the normality test through skewness and kurtosis, and the consistency of the data was tested using factor analysis. On an average, 74.6% of the respondents agreed that they focus on these factors of organizational learning. The federal owned GLCs place more emphasis on organizational learning than the state owned GLCs. This study suggests improving the practices of organizational learning within the GLCs in Malaysia by emphasizing on the consideration that employee learning is an investment rather than an expense, employees should view themselves as partners in charting the direction of the organization, employees should not be afraid of critically reflecting on the shared assumptions about the ways of managing the organization, and by analyzing unsuccessful organizational endeavours and communicating the lessons learned widely among the employees.