An Analysis Of Organizational Learning Process in Donor Agencies In Nairobi

Abstract

Every organization, whether service, government or nonprofit has limited resources, and the effective and efficient use of these limited resources will greatly determine which organizations will survive in the future, hence the concept of organizational learning. This study, therefore, attempts to establish the extent to which international donor agencies in Nairobi have embraced the features/characteristics of a learning organization established through organizational learning process. The study was carried out in international donor agencies with offices located in Nairobi. A structured questionnaire was administered to managers and supervisory level staff from these agencies since these are the people who are more likely to understand the issues involved in organizational learning, and thus provide adequate responses to the questionnaire. Chi-square tests were used to analyze the collected data. The results indicated that donor agencies in Nairobi, despite their non-competitive nature, have to some extent embraced the features/characteristics of a learning organization through knowledge acquisition, information distribution and information interpretation. The final part of the process, which is organizational memory is not so distinctly embraced as yet as indicated by this study. The study also revealed that in some cases, the age, position in the agency and education level of respondents determined the extent to which aspects of organizational learning are embraced in the agencies.