Carpenter, R. E.

2021/7/27

Development and Learning in Organizations: An International Journal

35

6

18-21

Emerald Publishing Limited

Today's organizational knowledge is vulnerable to obsolescence. To remain viable in a competitive environment requires individuals and organizations alike to constantly learn. Learning at the individual or group level is a substrate of human cognition. Human cognition can be described as the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought. A mental action is the mindful representation (i.e. mental model) of possibilities. Intrinsic to any mental model is a perspective (Johnson-Laird, 2013). Perspective is the viewpoint from which learning as cognition ascribes. A growing body of literature has placed learning as cognition as a leaver for developing organizational learning. Organizational learning literature is notable for two primary offerings on the entity seen as learning as cognition—learning as individual cognition and learning as group cognition. Learning as individual cognition is learning at the individual level of analysis and can be considered the individual agency of a member's capacity to learn and adapt their mental models at the level of the organizational system (Senge, 1990). Learning as group cognition incorporates the emergence of a collective agency—the groups belief about its perceived capacity to perform—as system level phenomenon (Grand et al., 2016). Each level of cognition has an associated perspectival state that may influence the development of organizational learning. The aim of this paper is to present a viewpoint of learning as individual and group cognition and ascribe perspective as important foci for organization learning.

https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/DLO-08-2020-0183/full/pdf?title=learning-as-cognition-a-developmental-process-for-organizational-learning [pdf]

Learning as cognition: a developmental process for organizational learning
RE Carpenter - Development and Learning in Organizations: An International Journal, 2021