Title: The role of leadership in facilitating Organisational Learning and collective capacity building

Authors: Hosein Piranfar

Addresses: Business School, University of East London, Docklands Campus, 4-6 University Way, London, E16 2RD, UK

Abstract: The paper examines the role of leadership in facilitating collective learning and capacity building by utilising ideas from the fields of evolutionary learning, operations strategy, quality, project and risk management. Two contrasting cases are chosen to show how success and failure can depend upon collective capacity building through participative leadership and Organisational Learning (OL). The bulk of the literature surveyed concerns evolutionary OL in particular those that involve leadership which is rather a new development in this field. The paper welcomes the new trend but warns against the overenthusiastic views that ignore the reservations of the mainstream evolutionary/complexity perspective.

Keywords: collective learning; complexity; evolutionary learning; leadership; operations strategy; organisational learning; capacity building; quality management; project management; risk management.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLC.2007.017114

International Journal of Learning and Change, 2007 Vol.2 No.3, pp.269 - 285

Published online: 13 Feb 2008 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article