Transforming the public sector into learning organizations: the Egyptian experience applied on Egyptian National Railways

1. Preface: introduction and importance The notions Organizational Learning (OL) and Learning Organization (LO) are related and sometimes they are used interchangeably. Yet, OL involves specific type of activities that take place within the organization, whereas a LO refers to the entity itself (Yusoff, 2005: 464). Recently, the turbulent nature of the business environment calls for a contemporary advanced style of organization which is adaptive, and at the same time proactive to the future. This is completely-right in the wake of the current political, social, and global disorder that characterizes the world in general, and the Middle East in particular. LO is a common and popular example of these presently-needed organizations (El-Fekey, 2015: 85). As organizations are engaged in constant transformation, they ought to learn how to understand, influence, direct, and manage this transition. It should be acknowledged that change is integral to institutions, which hence requires their shift towards learning systems (Majila, 2012: 4). Nowadays, organizations in developing countries are striving to be a piece of the new global economy by becoming more sustainable and competitive, via adopting certain practices and strategies like OL (Nafei, 2015: 191). Nevertheless, organizations have realized that behavior modification cannot happen as a result of a separate learning incident, otherwise learning is now increasingly-regarded as an ongoing procedure rather than a single event. Consequently, leading companies have to leave ancient traditional methods of learning in favor of more innovative and effective novel approaches to improve their performance (Aly, 2017: 1). In the Arab world, there is still a need to promote our understanding of how OL occurs in organizations and how it could be enhanced to reach a dynamic functional LO (Chiva et al., 2010). Actually, this topic is still in its infancy and there are not enough academic and theoretical writings on it. Besides, it has not yet gotten its share of attention in practice and application (Nafei, 2015: 192). It was noticed also that the existed literature is limited in its Western contextual scope. Thus, this study aims at contributing to the extant empirical research by filling that critical gap. This reveals the significance of the present study theoretically and practically in clarifying the problems and requirements of establishing LOs in Egypt. On the other hand, it is noteworthy that many of the criticisms of public organizations imply a failure to utilize knowledge and experience in order to take better responsible decisions; in short an OL deficiency. However, there is a quite little research conducted on OL and LO in the public sector. In fact, research and theories in government and OL have evolved separately. This dichotomy was illustrated in the literature review done by Rashman et al. (2009) concerning the virtual shortage of references and information on OL in public sector organizations. This is truly-surprising because the concept of OL has been the primary assumption which fosters most of the neoteric public management reforms, such as performance management, total quality management, benchmarking, and reengineering (Moynihan and Landuyt, 2009: 1097). Thereby, although the existed body of literature about LO and OL, it is predominately-stemmed from private sector approaches, lacking thorough studies which can depict the unique attributes of public administration, such as political interventions, bureaucratic influences, and power mechanisms (Teixeira, 2015: 24). Moreover, when shifting from theory to practice it would be better to conduct empirical quantitative analysis to adequately measure the actual application level of concepts in practice. Therefore, the relative dominance of qualitative research on learning in the public setting, as stated by (Moynihan and Landuyt, 2009: 1103), provides additional substantial relevance to this study. In sum, the researcher here believes this is a meaningful area that entails more interest, with specific reference to Egypt. Accordingly, this work is designed to set and develop some criteria to distinguish organizations as either learning or non-learning entities and to judge their capacity of learning, then building a comprehensive conceptual model for transforming public organizations into learning ones. Hence, the paper strives to prescribe a proposed framework to facilitate the adoption of the LO concept within state-owned enterprises, via determining the key aspects of OL that are applicable to governments; in other words investigating the factors in which their presence is crucial for the establishment of public LOs. Furthermore, it tends to shed light on the Egyptian reality; detecting problems in carrying out such model and recommending solutions to resolve and overcome this dilemma. Hopefully, the study could be a modest step towards conducting further inclusive research to evaluate the Egyptian government endeavors to achieve the sustainable development strategy (Egypt’s Vision 2030) regarding the improvement of public performance. 2. Problem definition: research purpose and objectives Environmental changes are usually way fast and require the ability to analyze the situation, test the impact on the organization, and take adaptive and generative actions to cope with these circumstances. This can be done if the organization turns into a LO (Arma et al., 2016: 8). In this respect, OL is considered a major theme in management research generally. Its importance is justified because the survival, success, and competitive benefits of the organization depend largely on its capability to adapt to changes in both its internal and external environments, and this capacity necessarily implies ongoing individual and collective learning (Barrette et al., 2012: 137). So, OL is viewed as a great operative plan applied in order to encapsulate the learning and training processes within the organization, whereby OL needs to reach a stage where the shift to learning and making use of experience is much easier (Sun and Scott, 2003). From this view, OL could be one of the vital mechanisms that organizations should apply to bolster their sustainable running and operation of knowledge (Aly, 2017: 2). In governments, LO has the potential to become a substantial driver for improving the decision making quality and the policy execution. Nevertheless, to implement OL strategies and frameworks in a public sector setting is not as straight forward as it may appear or seem. It is well-recognized that the establishment of LOs in the public sector is a little bit more difficult than in the private sector. Some of the reasons explicating this problem are the organizational fragmentation and the difficulty in assessing the learning outcomes in governments. Thus, the adoption of the LO notion in public organizations still demands a better comprehension of the elements affecting OL in this context (Barrette et al., 2012: 137). Indeed, the subject of OL has been widely-discussed in literature, however it has only become a theme in the study of public management very recently. A quick literature review demonstrates that most of this discourse focuses on OL in business organizations. Despite the various similarities between private and public sectors, it is obviously not possible to simply copy and paste OL practices from business literature and applying them onto public institutions. Therefore, there is a need to investigate suitable ways to reinforce and institutionalize learning processes within governmental agencies (Majila, 2012: 4-5). Given the bureaucratic nature of public sector organizations where flexibility and responsiveness are hard-achieving, it is noticeable that this bureaucratic system is still attached to a considerable part of the Egyptian public sector which impacts the quality of services rendered to citizens. Hence, the starting point of this study is the assumption that the inefficiency and repetition of the same previous functioning errors in the Egyptian bureaucracy are resulted from the absence of systemic OL policies and strategies. Thereby, boosting OL and stimulating the switch of the Egyptian public sector to LOs will definitely support the government reforms towards the attainment of Egypt’s sustainable development strategy. In this regard, the general purpose of the paper is to contribute to the scientific body of research on OL within public sector organizations. Moreover, it presents the main dimensions and several enablers of OL and the embedded barriers towards establishing capable and competent LOs in governments. In that way, the research provides a thorough conceptual framework for transforming public organizations into learning ones, in addition to highlighting the limitations of successful implementation in the Egyptian scenario represented in the case of the Egyptian National Railways (ENR). Thence, this article is concerned with a master research question which is: “What are the essential requirements of establishing learning organizations in the public sector? & to what extent do the organizational learning processes contribute to the learning organization capability in the case of Egyptian National Railways?” To answer this broad question, the research aims to answer the following sub-questions which considered as the main objectives of this study: • What is the meaning of OL? how can we differentiate it from LO? what are the key phases/ aspects associated with OL? & how is the overall LO capacity determined? • What is the problem of OL in the public sector? • How could the organizational factors influence the learning environment and processes within public organizations in the Egyptian reality? • How could the learning practices applied at ENR be evaluated? Subsequently, the paper examines its fundamental variables, as illustrated below in figure (1): Learning organization establishment/ development Figure (1) Research conceptual model Source: Prepared by the researcher(*). (*) Note that the researcher here has drawn on Senge (2006, 1990) two-construct scale for measuring OL, as well as adopting Jerez-Gomez et al. (2005) four-dimension scale to identify LO capability, and concerning the organizational facilitators, the study has relied on some major indicators extracted from previous literature (e.g. Aly, 2017; El-Fekey, 2015).