Organizational Learning Orientation and Sustainable Competitive Advantage: Towards More Accountable Government-Linked Companies

Abstract

Government-Linked Companies (GLCs) are expected to show competitive performance in order to reflect the accountability of taxpayers’ money. Therefore, this study is an attempt to assess the status of the current level of organizational learning orientation among the Government-Linked Companies (GLCs) in Malaysia. This study collected primary data based on a set of questionnaire survey among 134 executives and managers of GLCs in Malaysia. The data were collected based on opinions of the ten factors of organizational learning practices by using the five-point Likert scale. The data were analysed using descriptive statistics. Further, the reliability of the data was tested using Cronbach’s alpha test, the validity of the data was tested by checking the normality test through skewness and kurtosis, and the consistency of the data was tested using factor analysis. On an average, 74.6% of the respondents agreed that they focus on these factors of organizational learning. The federal owned GLCs place more emphasis on organizational learning than the state owned GLCs. This study suggests improving the practices of organizational learning within the GLCs in Malaysia by emphasizing on the consideration that employee learning is an investment rather than an expense, employees should view themselves as partners in charting the direction of the organization, employees should not be afraid of critically reflecting on the shared assumptions about the ways of managing the organization, and by analyzing unsuccessful organizational endeavours and communicating the lessons learned widely among the employees.

Empowerment as a strategy to achieve the competitive advantage of organizations: A mediating role of organizational learning

“…(2017) investigated the relationship between organizational learning and competitive advantage in the context of Taiwan and found the contributory role of organizational learning into a firm competitive advantage. In another study, the authors found a positive and significant relationship between organizational learning and competitive advantage (Zulkarnain et al, 2016). Therefore, above discussed literature show the contributory role of organizational learning in firm competitive advantage against competitors, hence organizational learning can sustain the competitive advantage in the context of Iraq, where low competition recorder.…”

“…There are many researchers found the critical factors which constitute a contributing part in sustainable competitive advantage such as export business strategy (Leonidou et al, 2015); marketing capabilities (Tan & Sousa, 2015); human resource management practices (Albrecht et al, 2015); dynamic capabilities (Li & Liu, 2014); information technology and knowledge management (Mao et al, 2016); employee empowerment (Ghosh, 2013) and organizational learning (Zulkarnain et al, 2016). Yet, Francescato and Aber (2015) stated that empowerment is (a) to offer the opportunity for advancement, (b) to access to information, (c) to access to funding, and (d) the opportunity to develop and discover.…”

Innovation Risk and Sustainable Competitive Advantages: Empirical Assessment of Government-Linked Companies in Malaysia

“…Some GLCs have not been able to create any value and have been experiencing poor performance namely companies like the Proton Holding Berhad and the Malaysian Airline System. Thus, the GLCs have to try harder with new initiative to create value in order to address the government's needs and expectations while increasing and adding value to their services, products, and enterprise performance (Aziz et al, 2015a,b,c;Said et al, 2015Said et al, , 2016aLawler & Mohrman, 2013;Zulkarnain et al 2016). According to Khazanah (2014), starting from 2015, GLCs must improve and work on their creation of value by concentrating on sustainability practices and the execution.…”