Organisational learning culture : the relationship to employee well-being and employee resilience.

Abstract

Organisations who want to compete and survive in today’s turbulent business environment must not only be able to continuously update the human capital that exists in a firm, but also ensure they promote the development of a workforce who can adapt to ongoing, dynamic challenges, and maintain a positive state of mental health and functioning so that they can successfully contribute to innovation and performance. One way that organisations can achieve sustainable competitive advantage is by establishing an organisational learning culture that promotes continuous learning and capability development. The purpose of the current study was to explore the effect of learning culture dimensions, namely continuous learning, inquiry and dialogue, team learning, knowledge sharing systems, and empowerment, on employee well-being and resilient behaviours, when proactive personality and positive affect were controlled for. A self-report online questionnaire was distributed to professionals from a number of New Zealand and Australian organisations at a single time point. Regression analyses on a sample of 189 professionals found that continuous learning was significantly related to employees’ well-being and resilience, beyond the effect of individual differences on these outcomes. However, no other learning culture dimension examined in the study was significantly related to well-being or resilience, once individual differences were controlled for. These findings indicate the importance of continuous learning opportunities for improving well-being and promoting resilient behaviours among employees, and suggest that this feature of a learning culture may have a more positive impact on individual outcomes than the other features. Future research is needed to explore what outcomes the other learning culture dimensions directly tap into.