Organizational Learning in Public Construction Organizations: A Case Study

Although knowledge and innovation management has been studied through the lens of business optimization for manufacturing and software industries, a rather detailed approach has not yet been studied in construction industry. Public sector design and construction organizations could benefit from a better understanding of organizational learning through their utilization of knowledge and innovation management systems. The challenges for successfully establishing a learning organization are known to be the unique, complex, multi-stakeholder/trade, high turnover nature of each construction program, and the variety of authentic complications simultaneously occurring at project sites. This research strives to understand and evaluate the attributes of organizational learning within public construction project settings. In order to do so, an exploratory case study of a public organization that manages more than 1,000 individual facilities with 8.2 million square feet under roof is presented as the initial benchmark. The interview findings pointed out several crucial concepts for a public construction organization such as learning culture and risk averse attitude, importance of responsibility-authority alignment for accountability, innovation versus fear of failure, utilization of organizational hierarchy, lateral, and vertical communication as well as the isolating impacts of silos within the organization. Following the identified issues, a semantic network analysis study has been performed on the interview data to observe the relationships between different concepts. This study will be utilized by the public construction organizations for future benchmarking and resource allocation to increase performance towards operational excellence through organizational learning and knowledge management.