Introduction
Learning organisation, of what Senge (1992) described, is any organisation that possessed all the quality of personal mastery, mental models, team learning, shared vision, and systems thinking. This notion of learning organisation has put many organisations in an endless process of learning and changing. They have to struggle to change so many elements in the organisation, whether it is the structure or culture of the organisation, in order to fit with this notion.
This concept of learning organisation is also applied in educational organisations. However, it is still an on-going debate whether the educational institutions have achieved and build the proper learning organisation’s features specific to its context. Therefore, this paper will argue that in order to build a learning organisation for an educational institution, the nature of the organisation, the leader, and the change about to be implemented play a crucial inter-connectedness.
Educational organisation today
Drawing from experience and personal observation, educational organisations are those that less likely to change, despites studies of changing in organisations that emerge from these kind of institutions. Persons in the educational organisations tend to be trapped in administrative routine and busy to tackle the pressures that come from its external environment. So working in educational institutions is just like working for a machine. Bottery (2004, pp 174-178) noted that the learning organisation’s notion is not properly implemented in educational institutions. He argued this is happened due to the learning organisation was initially designed for economic-based organisations.
Educational organisations, in their own way, are unique. Partly, because of the effect of the globalisation, they are becoming more and more commodified (Brown & David, 2001). By saying this, it means that educational organisations are demanded to act like other economic-driven organisations. These institutions have to deliver their services that meet the market demand, qualified and professionals’ outputs. Competitions among universities happened worldwide, in order for them to survive. This alone has put a lot of pressure on the people inside the organisation.
Yet. There are more to add to the pressure above such as, leader insensitivity toward the pressure and workers resentment to embrace change are some other features that made the condition in educational institution far more difficult.
In general, many leaders candidate look great in terms of what they wanted to achieve before they rule. Unfortunately, most failed to perform to the level that they expect they would once they are leading the organisations. From my personal observation, many of them spend their time in creating the good image about themselves and the rest trapped in administrative routine, just like managers and not leaders. At the end of their journey as the leaders, they realize that they have not done much, so they want the second attempt to lead. Unfortunately, either they do not get the second chance to lead or they repeat the same mistakes.
It is common that many leaders in organisation institutions; once they elected to lead, they applied the Greek culture/bureaucratic culture in the organisation (Handy, 1976, pp 67-73). This means that the organisation being divided into bureaus and divisions with less flexibility to move around. The structure of the organisation is very clear and concise. Therefore it is suspected that change in this kind of situation is hard to take place. However, this does not justify the so called flexible organic organisation to exist in educational organisation. This is simply because, if the formal structure is not there, the organisation could simply slip into another mess. A familiar example happened recently in my university back home, where some lecturers by passed the deputy rector of academic affair, and went to straight to get approval from the rector to study postgraduate in another university in Surabaya, and he signed it. Sadly, it turned out that the program that they were studying in was not accredited. It cost the accreditation of our university going down from B to C (Banpt,2011).
Leadership, change, and learning organisation
By the explanation above, it is sufficient to claim that, change, leaders, and learning organisation specific for educational organisations are equally critical in an educational organisation. It is also important to acknowledge that these three elements have to coexist in order to create a sustainable educational organisation.
To begin with, leaders as DuBrin (2004) believed are those who create change and transform the organisation. In vein with him, Daft (2005, p.18) stated in one of his leader’s criterion as someone who created change and a culture of integrity. It is clear that leader cannot be separated from change, since she or he is the one who at least stimulate change in the organisation. It is more than just a responsibility for them; it is their nature. The over whelming pressure from outside the educational world, in addition to personal pressure that each member of the organisation brings into the organisation, has made the organisation unbearable for so many people, that they decided to leave the educational organisation. The lack of teachers in many regions of the world could be a supporting fact to this phenomenon.
Change, in the light of globalisation, is what leaders of the organisation should be prepared to expect. He/she has to be able to predict the depth of it, it consequences, and how to embed that change into a daily routine of the organisation. This ability to embed change in the daily routine of the organisation, as Levin and Gotlieb (2009) suggested will minimize the resistance of the workers toward that change that Connor (1995) as cited in Yukl (2006, 285-286) has mentioned.
In relation to change and learning organisation, leader in educational university has to be able to facilitate a change toward a learning organisation that suitable with educational institution. This is important to be noticed as Gilles and Morrison (2010, p 64) agreed that current leadership in educational organisation tend to fall back into leadership in economic rationale. It implies that leader in educational organisations’ rule in facilitating the emergence learning organisation specific to the paradigms of education set by the organisation itself is becoming more crucial.
Bottery (2004, p. 177) has pointed out several paradigms of education, in which the leader has to be able to create the the learning organisation that suit these paradigms. Leader has to look back on the nature of the organisation, if the objective of the organisation is to operate in economic productivity dimension, then it is the leaders’ role to create an environment that nurture the emergence of learning organisation for specific purpose is needed. Once leaders in educational organisation can foresee interconnection between themselves, -what type of learning organisation needed, and how to execute the learning organisation needed (persuade people to accept the change)-, the leaders will most likely succeed in carrying out their leading roles.
Interconnectedness of the issues in the educational organisation
Despite to its simplicity in words this notion of interconnectedness of leadership, learning organisation, and change in educational organisation might appear to be, the process is never be a set of simple steps or formulas. This is dues to many other things, such as cultures, climate, and external and internal environments pressure adding into the context of educational organisation. Fulan (2001, p 44-46) agreed that the process of leading change in an organisation is always complex, and that there is no single best ways of doing it, as he agreed with Pascal et.al that organisation as a living system could not avoid uncertainties on its path.
Sadly, it has been a publicly known that changes in the educational organisation mostly occur in skin depth. New structures being implemented but the behaviours and attitude of the members of the organisation remain the same.
An example in the light of what Bottery (2004) called as economic productivity and banking function of the educational organisation happened in many higher educational institutions. Infrastructures such as computer labs installed almost in every faculty to enable learners achieve their maximum potentials. Alas, the purpose of instalment shifted from academic purposes into online gaming, and social networking. Organisations send people to be trained outside of the organisation, often resulting people keeping their knowledge for themselves.
To certain extent, the example above happened. Nevertheless, there are also cases where leaders were able to get people on board to the idea of changing into a learning organisation. It is true that leader is someone expected to make change happened. Yet, it has to be remembered what Wheatley said that, ‘life insists on its freedom to participate and can never be coerced into accepting someone else’s plan’ (2005, p. 89). For leaders’ in educational institution, Giles (2011) found that unless leaders in these institution being re-educate to make a relationship with their fellow students in the institutions improve, the change for betterment of what we called learning organisation will never happened.
Conclusion
Many leaders claimed that their organisation as learning organisation. Yet, very few of them do encourage continuous learning experiences through changes and knowledge sharing. Process of change in many organisation happened in systems and structural level in their efforts to be a learning organisation. Meanwhile the deep structure (culture and climate of the organisation) remained the same. Leaders in educational organisation in their effort to create change through being a learning organisation have to have a mindset that they are leading human not machine. Facilitating the personal growth of members of the organisation is also one of the leaders role. Good leader alone is not enough, unless he/she is able to facilitate his organisation to change into a learning organisation. Learning organisation is the only way organisation can survive in the global competition.
References
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