Lifelong learners and learning organisations: Perspective of Australian university academics

Organisational learning and learning organisations are a significant part of knowledge management. Learning organisations focus on capturing knowledge from their surrounding environment internally and externally. The emancipatory rhetoric of the learning organisation is crucial to effective tacit knowledge transfer and universities are no exception. This paper explores academics’ and their workplaces’ (universities) conduciveness to be lifelong learners and learning organisations respectively, through questionnaire surveys of academics in four Australian public universities. The statistical analysis examines the respondents’ propensity to be lifelong learners, universities’ criticality of failure, provision and appreciation of feedback and other key aspects of universities as learning organisations. The study found that, firstly, an overwhelming majority of academics consider themselves to be lifelong learners i.e. inquiring mind, committed to ongoing personal development, experiment with new ways of doing their work. Secondly, most respondents believe their university provides continuous learning opportunities for staff, demonstrates an openness to change and adaptability and has a shared vision. However, on the other end, respondents believe that universities are very critical of failure and do not see it as a learning process. This study is significant because organisational learning is a vital outcome of tacit knowledge transfer, which lies at the foundation of most organisational knowledge processes and universities globally can derive value from it.