An examination of the relationships between organizational learning culture, structure, organizational innovativeness and effectiveness: Evidence from Taiwanese organizations

Sustained performance has been a critical objective for organizations that they must pursue in order to survive in today's keenly competitive business environment. Researchers in the field of organization studies tend to follow one of the two main approaches, namely organizational and economic perspectives, to explain firm performance. Although neither of these perspectives can be neglected, advocates of the resource-based view argue that in order to outperform competitors, organizations must possess valuable and scare resources. Innovativeness, in this regard, is deemed as an intangible asset and becomes a key factor supporting organizations' sustained competitive advantages.; Existing studies on organizational innovativeness suffer from two major shortcomings. First, most studies fail to provide sufficient evidence and suggestions of how organizations can strengthen their organizational innovativeness. Second, most of the previously conducted studies define innovativeness with a technological orientation. Both shortcomings constrain the generalizability of findings to a wider variety of organizations in the real world. Departing from the perspective of seeing organizational innovativeness as a type of climate, this study defines organizational innovativeness as an organization's capability to embrace an organization-wide atmosphere that is willing to accept diverse ideas and is open to newness, and that encourages its individual members to think in novel ways.; The primary question this study sought to answer was: How do organizational-level factors as antecedents affect organizational innovativeness and effectiveness? More specifically, the study examined the relationships among organizational level factors (i.e., organizational learning culture, structure, and collectivist orientation), organizational absorptive capacity, organizational innovativeness, and effectiveness. A hypothesized model suggested that organizational learning culture, structural organicity, and collectivist orientation jointly influence an organization's innovativeness, which subsequently enhances a firm's performance.; The study used a survey research method and structural equation modeling techniques to examine the hypothesized relationships among constructs using data collected from 246 business organizations in Taiwan. The results of the study using structural equation modeling analysis shows that (a) organizational learning culture plays a crucial role to enhance organizational absorptive capacity and innovativeness; (b) the influence of structural organicity on innovativeness is not as significant as shown in previous studies; and (c) both absorptive capacity and innovativeness are critical to organizational effectiveness.