Editing Organizational learning (section)

=== Measuring learning ===
Organizational learning tracks the changes that occur within an organization as it acquires knowledge and experience. To evaluate organizational learning, the knowledge an organization creates, transfers, and retains must be quantified.

Researchers studying organizational learning have measured the knowledge acquired through various ways since there is no one way of measuring it. Silvia Gherardi measured knowledge as the change in practices within an organization over time, which is essentially learning from experience.<ref name="Gherardi, Silvia 20052" /> In her study, she observed an organization acquire knowledge as its novices working at building sites learned about safety through experience and became practitioners. George Huber measured knowledge as the distribution of information within an organization. In his study, he noted that "organizational components commonly develop 'new' information by piecing together items of information that they obtain from other organizational units."<ref name="Huber, George P 1991">{{cite journal | last1 = Huber | first1 = George P | year = 1991 | title = Organizational Learning: The Contributing Processes and the Literatures | jstor=2634941 | journal = Organization Science | volume = 2 | issue = 1| pages = 88–115 | doi=10.1287/orsc.2.1.88}}</ref> He gives the example of "a shipping department [that] learns that a shortage problem exists by comparing information from the warehouse with information from the sales department."<ref name="Huber, George P 1991"/>

An increasingly common and versatile measure of organizational learning is an organizational [[learning curve]] demonstrating [[experience curve effects]]. A learning curve measures the rate of a metric of learning relative to a metric for experience. [[Linda Argote]] explains that "large increases in productivity typically occur as organizations gain experience in production."<ref name="Argote Book5">Argote, Linda. Organizational Learning: Creating, Retaining, and Transferring Knowledge. Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1999. 28.</ref>  However, Argote also notes that organizations' rates of learning vary. Argote identifies three factors that affect these rates: increased proficiency of individuals, improvements in an organization's technology, and improvements in its structure (such as its routines and methods of coordination).<ref name="Argote Book5" />  Some organizations show great productivity gains while others show little or no gains, given the same amount of experience.<ref name="Argote Book5" /><!-- Deleted image removed: [[File:Experience curve.gif|right|frame|Fig 1. Experience Curve]] -->The experience curves plot the decreasing unit cost versus the total cumulative units produced, a common way to measure the effect of experience. The linear-linear input form on the left is transformed into the log-log form on the right to demonstrate that the proficiency increase correlates with experience.