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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how absorptive capacity mediates the relationship between ambidextrous organizational learning and performance among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Based on the resource-based view (RBV) and the dynamic capability approach, this paper uses the resource-capability-performance framework to construct the theoretical model of this study and tests the theoretical model with the questionnaire survey data of 189 SMEs in mainland China.

Ambidextrous organizational learning has different effects on SMEs' performance in terms of survival performance and growth performance. Both exploitative learning and exploratory learning have positive effects on absorptive capacity, and absorptive capacity has positive influences on both the survival performance and growth performance of SMEs. Absorptive capacity plays different mediating roles in the relationships between ambidextrous organizational learning and SMEs' performance: absorptive capacity plays a partial mediating role in the relationship between exploratory learning and SME growth performance, while absorptive capacity plays complete mediating roles in other relationships.

Managers must stress the use of exploratory learning in order to promote SMEs' growth performance. However, to foster both absorptive capacity and SME performance in terms of survival and growth, managers must pay more attention to take advantage of ambidextrous organizational learning. Government as policymakers should create a favorable environment that enable SMEs to benefit much more from the deployment of ambidextrous organizational learning and absorptive capacity.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to theorize and test the mediating role of absorptive capacity in the linkage between ambidextrous organizational learning and SME performance in terms of survival and growth. Additionally, this study also is the first to provide empirical support for the impact of ambidextrous organizational learning on absorptive capacity among SMEs.

The study examined the impact of feedback types through a learning management system (LMS) on employees’ training performance. The purpose of this study is to establish effective feedback on advanced technologies for promoting corporate training.

A total of 148 trainees were recruited from a multinational medical company. Employees were randomly assigned to receive feedback from shallow to more constructive details on their learning performance with LMS. Data sources included are employees’ goal setting (GS) performance evaluated by the experts and their posttest scores obtained from the LMS. A series of statistical analyses were performed to investigate the impact of feedback intervention on employees’ GS and their impacts on corporate training results.

GS has a significant impact on learning outcomes. Employees who set greater specific goals attained higher scores. Furthermore, feedback with more formative evaluation and constructive developmental advice resulted in the most significant positive influence on the relationship between participants’ GS and learning outcomes.

Organizations can benefit from delivering appropriate feedback using LMS to enhance employees’ GS and learning efficacy in corporate training.

This study is one of the first to examine the moderating effect of feedback provided by LMS on GS and online learning performance in corporate training. This study contributes to GS theory for practical application and proposes a viable method for remote learning. The current study’s findings can be used to provide educational psychological insights for training and learning in industrial contexts.

This study's main objective is to examine the effect of learning from entrepreneurial failure on performance, with a type of failure as a moderator variable. Interactions between internal and external causes of failure and learning from entrepreneurial failure are also investigated, as well as entrepreneurs' aspects (i.e. age, experience and education) and organisational contextual factors (i.e. size, sector and location).

This study employed a hypothetico-deductive approach through a survey of 250 purposively sampled entrepreneurs who had suffered business failures. The survey data were subjected to regression analysis and moderated regression using WarpPLS software and an independent sample t test for an in-depth analysis.

The results indicated that learning from entrepreneurial failure positively affected business performance, an effect moderated by the type of failure, particularly with large failures. Only perceived internal causes of failure exerted a positive effect on learning from entrepreneurial failure; the external causes did not. The effect of failure on business performance was stronger on entrepreneurs who were older and experienced, had non-university educations and operated small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) outside Java–Bali islands.

This study's findings provide empirical evidence that supports the experiential learning theory and attribution theory in explaining the interaction between learning and failure, its cause, its consequences and its magnitude as perceived by entrepreneurs of SMEs in Indonesia, where the rate of failure is relatively high. The authors’ study also emphasises the roles of the entrepreneur and organisational contextual factors, which matter in learning to improve performance.

This study aims to investigate the effects of leadership competences (cognitive, interpersonal, and results-oriented competences) on organizational learning, organizational innovation, and business performance.

Data were collected from owners, chief executive officers, top and middle management teams, and other managers of tourism and hospitality firms in Vietnam. A total of 638 valid responses was collected and processed using PLS-SEM technique.

The findings revealed that only results-oriented competence exerted significant influences on business performance. Organizational learning was affected by all three leadership competences, while only cognitive and interpersonal competences positively affected organizational innovation. The relationships among organizational learning, organizational innovation, and business performance were also confirmed. Moreover, the findings emphasized the mediating roles of organizational learning and organizational innovation in the relationship between leadership competences and business performance. Organizational learning and organizational innovation also acted as a mediator in the relationship between cognitive competence and business performance.

This study provided some suggestions for tourism and hospitality leaders in exhibiting appropriate leadership competences, strengthening organizational learning, and fostering organization innovation to enhance business performance.

Although the topics of leadership competences, organizational learning, organization innovation, and business performance have received a great concern among worldwide academia, there is scarce research examining the relationships among these four phenomena together. This paper is among the first study that offers a comprehensive model of the relationships among these domains.

The purpose of this study is to empirically test how problem-solving lean practices, along with leaders as learning facilitators in an action learning approach, can be transferred from a production context to a knowledge work context for the purpose of becoming a learning organization while enhancing performance. This is important to study because many organizations struggle to enhance efficiency in the short term while still trying to be long-term learning oriented (i.e. learning organization development).

The authors draw on theory on learning interventions to show how lean practices for problem-solving can foster learning and help an organization to become adaptive. This study’s subject is a non-production department of 100 employees at the LEGO corporation. The authors applied survey results from a natural experiment lasting 18 months between a pre-measurement survey and a post-measurement survey. The results were compared to a control department of 50 employees who were not exposed to the lean practices intervention. The authors’ focus was on the individual level as individuals have different perceptions of lean practices, performance, and learning.

Using repeated-measures tests, difference-in-difference regressions analyses, and structural equation models, the authors find that a package of contemporary lean practices for problem-solving, along with leaders who function as learning facilitators, significantly improved learning organization dimensions while also enhancing efficiency and quality and that learning organizations positively mediate the relationship between the lean intervention and quality-related performance, while efficiency is directly affected by the lean interventions. Data from LEGO's key performance indicators (KPIs), benefit trackers, on-site observations and more than 40 interviews with managers provided results that were consistent with the survey data. A detailed description of the lean practices implemented is provided to inspire future implementations in non-operations environments and to assist educators.

The authors contribute to the learning literature by showing that a learning-to-learn approach to lean management can serve as an active and deliberate intervention in helping an organization becoming a learning organization as perceived by the individual organizational members. The authors also add to the lean literature by showing how a learning approach to lean, as used by LEGO, can positively affect short-term efficiency and quality and create a foundation for a longer-term competitive advantage (i.e. a learning organization) in a non-production context. By contrast, most of the lean literature streams treat efficiency separately from a learning organization and mainly examine lean in a production context.

The extant literature shows three research streams on lean, learning, and performance. The authors built on these streams by trying to emphasize both learning and efficiency. Prior research has not empirically tested whether and how the application of problem-solving lean practices combined with leaders as learning facilitators helps to create a comprehensive learning organization while enhancing performance in a non-production context.

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the supply chain learning (SCL)–performance relationship based on the existing empirical evidence.

We sampled 54 empirical studies on the SCL–performance relationship. We proposed a conceptual research framework and adopted a meta-analytical approach to analyse the SCL–performance relationship.

The results of the meta-analysis confirm the positive effects of SCL on the performance of both firms and supply chains. In addition, building on the knowledge-based view, we found that learning from customers has a stronger positive effect on performance than does learning from suppliers, while joint learning has a stronger positive effect on performance than does absorptive learning. Business knowledge had a greater effect on performance than did general knowledge, process knowledge or technical knowledge, while explicit knowledge had a stronger effect than tacit knowledge. Moreover, the SCL–performance relationship is moderated by performance measure and industry type but not by regional economic development, highlighting the broad applicability of SCL.

This study is the first meta-analysis on the SCL–performance relationship. It differentiates between learning from customers and learning from suppliers, examines a more comprehensive list of performance measures and tests five moderators to the main effect, significantly contributing to the SCL literature.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the connections between individual learning, intrapreneurship, and organizational learning to create an alternative model of how learning facilitates performance in organizations.

This is a conceptual paper selecting targeted scholarly works that provide support for the proposed model.

The paper presents a model of intrapreneurial learning and performance in which the constructs of environment, individual learning, intrapreneurship, and organizational learning influence organizational performance. Intrapreneurship is a relatively recent area of exploration in which scholarly efforts have primarily focused on identifying the construct and distinguishing it from entrepreneurship. The proposed model of intrapreneurial learning and performance joins a growing number of works that explore how intrapreneurship contributes to organizational performance. It is suggested that the framework may help scholars identify potential strategies of learning that could help organizations position intrapreneurship as a vehicle for improving organizational performance.

The paper postulates an original relationship among individual learning, intrapreneurship, organizational learning, environment, and organizational performance. In this framework, individual and organizational learning combine to offer a unique perspective on the link between intrapreneurship and organizational performance.

The purpose of this study was to examine the antecedent, perception of the external environment, and its relationship to organizational learning, as well as explore the relationships between organizational learning and innovation performance at two levels, including individual and organizational‐level innovation performance.

Questionnaire data were collected from 268 senior R&D project team members who reported their perception about the external environment and organizational learning along with 83 R&D managers who evaluated their employees' innovative behaviors.

The results indicated that the antecedent of organizational learning, perception of external environment, was significant to organizational learning, and organizational learning was significant to both individual and organization‐level innovation performance and contributed more to the individual‐level than organizational innovation performance.

The value of the study lies in its contributions to the scholarly literature on organizational learning and innovation because examining the antecedent perception of the external environment and the relationships between organizational learning and innovation performance as well as the relationship between individual and organizational‐level innovation performance have not received considerable empirical attention.

Employees often improve at work by learning from others who have been successful. They learn by hearing their stories. However, the number of stories, task type and context all affect learning. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the number of stories they hear, the type of task they are learning to perform and their performance in the task to date all affect performance improvement.

The authors examine how task complexity and recent performance relative to others influence the relationship between the number of success stories a person reads and their subsequent performance. The authors used a sample of order processing employees from a label manufacturing company to test our hypotheses.

The authors find that in complex tasks, subsequent performance is highest when people read a small number of stories, and lowest when people read no stories or too many stories. In simple tasks, the authors find that when people have average recent performance, more stories leads to lower performance, but when recent performance is high or low, more stories increases subsequent performance.

The authors move beyond research that shows that people do not learn as much from success as they could and that success primarily promotes reinforcement to examine contingencies that enhance or detract from learning from success stories. This adds nuance to existing theory.

This study suggests access to others’ success stories is an alternative that can provide employees with ideas for how to improve their own performance. But care and consideration must be taken to limit the number of success stories based on the complexity of the task.

There is little research on either the vicarious learning of simple tasks in organizations or on how employees learn from others’ success stories. This matters because vicarious learning can enable employees to avoid missteps and create opportunities that would likely not happen if they only learn from their own experiences.

The main objective of this study was to examine academic staff's perceptions of the characteristics of a learning organization within higher education: in this instance, the International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM). The study also examined the relationship between the characteristics of a learning organization and satisfaction with performance in teaching and research activities.

A survey method was used in a sample of 400 academicians with a return rate of 214 (53.5 per cent). Watkins and Marsick's and Marsick and Watkins's learning organization questionnaire was used to measure the characteristics of the learning organization and to collect data for the study.

The main results showed that the academic staff indicated moderate levels of the characteristics of a learning organization and satisfaction with performance. The results also showed that there were positive and significant relationships between dimensions of the learning organization and satisfaction with performance activities in teaching and research. Furthermore, dimensions of the learning organization accounted for small but significant variance of satisfaction with both teaching and research performance activities.

This study contributes empirical findings on learning organization in a higher learning institution, a research area in which there is a scarcity of empirical studies.