Learning
Learning is basically conditioning and modification of behaviour through training and experiences which a person is exposed to in his day to day life. A person who is said to be learned is considered to be ideal for the society which can be proven as an asset to the society. Learning can also be held the permanent and the unwavering change in the state of mind of a person which is a result of his exposure to the prior incidents and experiences. Learning is capable of influencing a person’s state of mind and his behaviour towards the society. We have often seen and witnessed that a so called learned person is a better performer at a given day and a given point in time. The process of learning can influence a person’s capabilities, perception, state of mind and motivation. It is often regarded as the most powerful incentive for many to remain fixed to an organization no matter what grave situation they actually face as now they are able to apply the various aspects of learning to come out of the situation. Learning tends to increase the thinking power of a person as a result of which he is able to take various decisions in a logical and appropriate format. Learning in totality is the permanent metamorphosis that occurs as a result of a person’s responses to stimuli with the environment.
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There are various concepts attached to the process of learning and it’s after effects. One such example is the difference between Explicit Knowledge and Tacit Knowledge. On one hand where explicit knowledge is articulated through language such as documents, the tacit knowledge stand for knowledge acquired through observing people and the direct interaction experience with the fellow men. Learning is the only vehicle to promote and emphasize on adaption through the process of experience. There are various definitions by scholars attached with learning. To list a few -:
“Give me a child at birth and through the process of learning I can make him anything you want”- B.F Skinner
“It’s what we did when we went to school.”- Anonymous
“Learning is not limited to schooling. It occurs throughout one’s life.”
“We stay here not very much to pay cheques, but we keep learning”.
We tend to work in tandem with the environment and alter our behaviour which we have acquired through leaning in order to get positive or negative feedbacks and consequences.
Learning is in fact completely dependent upon the environment.
Social learning theory can be subdivided into following aspects of learning-:
Behavioural Modelling – It is the process of observing and learning through others.
Learning Behaviour Consequence – Learning through what others have learnt.
Self-reinforcement –Reinforcing our learning which is within our control.
Below a process of learning is described which says that when a person gets to learn he actually tries to implement those qualities in his day to day life.
Theories on Learning
There are few important theories on Learning which are described as follows
Behaviourism
Cognitivism
Social Learning Theory
Social Constructivism
Multiple Intelligence
Brain-Based Learning
Behaviourism can be said to be confined to observable and measurable behaviour which can be divided into the following types:-
Classical Conditioning
Operant Conditioning
Social Conditioning
Classical Conditioning-:
It was the most important theories proposed by Ivan Pavlov a Russian Psychologist. He won the Nobel Prize in 1904 for the study in digestive processes.
His theory paved the way for most of the advancements in the field of Learning. It was his initiative that let other thinkers and philosophers to make contributions in the similar fashion. He classified the various aspects of Learning and sub categorized
them in order to set the right context for the world to start off with the process of Learning.
He divided it as follows-:
Unconditioned Stimulus– It is that stimulus that without condition naturally triggers and initiates response.
Unconditioned Response– This is the type of response that is innate in nature and no type of Learning is required for the same. It comes out naturally when a person responds to stimuli which are unconditioned in nature.
Conditioned Stimulus-It is a type of neutral stimuli that after becoming associated and related the conditioned stimuli, eventfully triggers response.
The original and the most famous experiment on learning is the classical conditioning involved in the salivary conditioning of Pavlov’s dog. When he was actually into this experiment one of the important things that he noticed was that the dog began to salivate even in the presence of the lab assistant who was given the duty of feeding the dog. A point important to note here is that the lab technician at that point of time had no meet but it was the conditioning of the dog that the lab assistant would feed him meet.
In his initial experiment what he did was that he rang bells to call dogs to feed them. He continued this process for a long time and then he soon noticed that even when he just rang the bells the dogs started to salivate. He drew a very important conclusion and that was a neutral stimuli (the bells) became a conditioned stimulus as a result of consistent pairing with the unconditioned which in this case was (meet).
Pavlov referred to this learned relationships a conditioned reflex (now called conditional response).
Operant Conditioning-Skinner
It is quite important to bridge the gap between conditional stimulus and unconditional response in order to get the right conditioned response. Another example regarding the same was that of an office scenario where the stimuli was that there would be managers visiting the premises, and for that the office was cleaned before every visit and the glass panes were cleaned. The workers came very well dressed on the day of the visit. So there was this conditioning done that whenever the menials started cleaning the window panes the workers thought it is probably a day when the people from the head office are going to visit the premises. So they all used to come in perfect, flawless attire. This is what Pavlov calls conditioned stimuli.
One of the other theories regarding the same suggests that Learning can be categorized into the following two types-:
Reinforcement- It is the characteristic that actually is the driving force behind the reoccurrence of the same response with a greater frequency.
Positive reinforcement-It happens when behaviour happens with a positive outcome and favourable stimuli which ultimately increases the frequency of response.
Negative reinforcement- It happens when a behaviour or response is followed by aversive stimulus thereby increasing the chances of its happening.
Punishment – It is consequence that causes a response or behaviour to happen with lesser frequency.
Positive Punishment- It happens when a behaviour or response is followed by aversive stimulus such as making noise and shouting thereby decreasing the chances of its happening.
Negative Punishment-It happens when behaviour occurs and is followed by removal of favourable stimuli such as taking away child’s toy which ultimately decreases the frequency of response.
Social Learning
It is defined as the ability of a person to learn by observing others or rather his social environment. It occurs in a very informal and inarticulate way. Albert Bandura is considered to be a pioneer in proposing this theory. Social learning actually has considerable amount of relevance in organizational behaviour. Whatever organization a person works in he or she would find the art of learning really helpful in achieving his goal.
Coming onto the works done by various researchers and authors on Learning we see that from Sage Journals an article in Management Learning says-:
We often see that learning is a process that incorporates a mix of various things which are actually vying to be a part of an effective organization with the help of knowledge and perception. Innovation in real terms can be defined as the creation and inception of a product, services or goods which are completely new to an organization and its business unit. A significant amount of work needs to be done for a good collaboration between learning and fostering innovation in an organization. As earlier we had mentioned that learning is a process which actually is the conditioning of mind to achieve a target. We also need to maintain significant effect on the fact that a healthy relationship is established between organizational learning and creativity. We must strike a balance in order to maintain focus on learning which in fact is a long and a hectic process. The sole purpose of going about researching on core values of Learning is to determine to what extent the identified learning organization dimensions are associated with innovation collaborated with Learning.
Then we have Sheila K.Macginnis in her Organizational Behaviour and Management Thinking says despite being important to active learning theory, astonishingly little research has been done to see as to what kind of results are to be expected of exploratory behaviour. This laboratory study addressed this gap using repeated measures to examine the role and dynamics of exploration in complex task learning. Findings showed task exploration was beneficial across a variety of learning outcomes. Dynamic effects were also observed: (a) exploration was directly related to practice performance at both in between and within the personal (b) exploration kept on decreasing with more number of trials(c) there was a decrease in exploration with pre training task related to knowledge. There was a huge difference between the studies done on people with greater Mental Awareness and those with pre training skills. Hence we see that learning can actually be assets to those who are able apply these in their day to day life. Through different models of learning we can actually imbibe the virtues of an organization.
As a matter of fact there are several important things and trends which are actually taking their course of action in the field of learning. Some of them can be described as follows -:
As individuals we have lot of learning opportunities. There are times when we are in a fix and we don’t know what to do or how to react. At that point of time it is learning abilities that take their toll and help us out of the situation. In easy times we actually have little impetus to learn the demand for this ought to be much clearer today
We as individuals also need to pay heed to the kind of environment we are exposed to. We have friends and peers with the help of whom we can actually expose ourselves to various environmental learning processes in order to imbibe the virtues of learning. We can try our best to go through various procedures and algorithms of learning. In fact we can assemble all our thoughts to work for the process of learning.
As an organization it is much important to play the right kind of roles in an organization and to see it happen and learning through the same procedure would actually empower our existence. It is powerful as much more timely and costly training activities, but they do need some investment if they are to work.
Organization need to maintain the fact that it’s the managers who are the trend setters. They can actually play vital role in the making of an enterprise and foster the process of learning. Various initiatives can be taken up in order to provide the various learning concepts in an organization.
Conclusion
So we have actually learnt what learning is all about. We have discussed the models, various researchers approach towards dealing with it. We find learning in day to day life. It is up to us how we take it. So concluding about the entire presentation on Learning I would once like to go through all the important aspects that we have dealt with Learning. So from the above presentation we conclude that Learning is basically a persistent change in human interpretation and performance capabilities as a result of his interpretation and responses to the environment.
Also learning can be defined as the permanent change in person’s mind and actions due to his behavioural changes. There are several theories that were attached to the process of learning which behaviourism, Cognitivitism, Social Learning theory, Social constructivism and Brain based Learning. We then discussed about the models which were Classical Conditioning explained by Pavlov and Operant Conditioning by Skinner. From the above discussions, it can be deduced that learning theories can be applied in various ways to influence organisational behaviours positively. The role of managerial processes in an organization that effects its learning is to motivate continuous and prolonged learning and after that transforming them into much desirable behaviours and processes to enhance and create sustainable environment and competitive edge. Managers must therefore make sure that proper roles are assigned to people and must keep on motivating them and should influence to perform better through the process of learning and groups in organisational settings and be familiar with the content and the cognitive motivational factors that drive employee satisfaction and commitment.
There are several key factors involved in an organization such as employee recognition, valuing his talent and remuneration on similar grounds, striking the right balance between work and personal life, his career empowerment and growth opportunities and sense of achievement can be used to instigate desirable employee dependency towards the achievement of common goal. However managers have to make sure that they do not fail to motivate the employees regarding the same.
There are various content theories of motivation that do suggest that various people have different needs and inhibitions at different point in time. Hence these theories also warn us against relying too heavily on remuneration portion as the sole motivating factor. To enhance learning the following approaches can be adopted-:
Organisations must foster favourable climate where workers are encouraged to learn and share knowledge acquired with others;
• The entire process of strategy development should be incorporated with learning in mind, and implement experimentation and feedback for the same;
• Members of the organization must be made an integral part of the organization to which they can contribute through their various stints with learning processes. This in a way would actually gather various feasible options for the organization as a whole and would serve them better.
• The sole purpose of effective learning is to teach people how to react to different situations. We have often seen that people react to situations in a different fashion, hence to maintain uniformity common learning measures must be adopted. This would help in an effective organization which contributes to the personality development as well.
• Managers must therefore maintain a healthy relation with their needs and psychological needs from the organization. Also managers must try and realize that people working under them might not have received the right learning in their past so he needs to make sure that he provides ample opportunities for the same. Also an individual tries his level best to do well within an organization. So we see that learning through various instances and procedures in life actually contributes to the personality development of an individual which in fact is the sole purpose of learning. At last I would wrap the entire learning process in a diagram below.
Bibliography
Griffin, R. W. (1999), “Management”, Houghton Mifflin Company, 6th Edition.
Honey, P. & Mumford, A. (1992), “The Manual of Learning Styles”, Honey Publications, 3rd Edition.
Huczynski, A. & Buchanan, D. (2007), “Organisational Behaviour”, Prentice Hall International.
Keller, F.S. (1969), “Learning: Reinforcement Theory”, New York, NY: Random House Inc.
Laudon, K.C. & Laudon J.P. (2006), “Management Information System: Managing the Digital Firm”, Pearson Education Inc, 10th Edition.
Lohman, M. C. (2005), “A survey of factors influencing the engagement of two professional groups in informal workplace learning activities”, Human Resource Development Quarterly, 16(4), 501-527.
