The Learning Organizations in Slovenian Economy

Abstract

Due to turbulent and unpredictable environment the operations of companies and other organizations are becoming more and more complex. They must be flexible, innovative and adaptive to the consumer, which cannot be achieved only with the traditional economic capital, but enlightened managers today recognize the importance of intellectual capital and by recent studies also positive psychological capital. All forms of capital allow the sustainable competitive advantage. Because the area is very large, we will focus on knowledge as intellectual capital of company, which represents the total knowledge of company and plays an important role by achieving company performance. Numerous organizations are nowadays being successfully transformed into learning organizations or companies and are therefore facing new challenges, improving constantly and fighting the competitors in order to take over a leading role in the branch. The aim of the Paper was to accentuate the importance and the role of knowledge in today's organizations trough the management concept of the learning organization, which establishes new techniques connected with continual learning and enables companies' constant restructuring and adjusting. Trough research we established the presence and spread of the concept of learning organization or its elements and furthermore differences in characteristics of the concept regarding the companies' respective size and ownership. The acquired results have been compared to research that acquired in the 2003 and we have determined the level of development in these years. Creation of organizations which are willing and able to learn will bring benefits to the whole economy and as a result to the society we live in.