Most hoteliers focus on the enhancement of customer
services and the retention of customer loyalty. To
achieve these goals, they attempt to continuously
understand what customers need and want. However,
sometimes these goals are difficult to achieve since
consumer behavior changes all the time. Interestingly,
as companies apply the concept of organizational
learning to their operations, achievement of these
goals might be enriched. Learning, including internal
learning and external learning, is a vital prerequisite
for the development of organizational learning. Learners
may not benefit in the future from a certain learning
process unless they capture appropriate skills and
knowledge, and the collective learning process is
taken on.
In this paper, knowledge capturing is defined as the
process of collecting and identifying useful information
(i.e. knowledge acquisition), exploiting and usefully
applying knowledge (i.e. knowledge leverage) and
disseminating it through the whole organization (i.e.
knowledge transfer) (cf. Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995).
Organizational learning, according to Garvin (1993), is
defined as ‘‘the process of improving action through
better knowledge and understanding’’ (p. 80). In other
words, organizational learning is a process of enabling a
company to transfer information to valued knowledge,
which in turn, enriches organizational capability of
adapting to environmental demands. It seems that this
learning process is a vital part of generating and
applying knowledge; and the concept of organizational
learning and knowledge capturing are intertwined and
interrelated.
The purpose of this paper is to elaborate the
content of new skills and knowledge which employees
learn and capture in two researched hotels and to
explore some key approaches which are utilized
for capturing knowledge. Semi-structured interviews
were administered in this study. The findings clearly
indicate that individual learning needs to be further
triggered, in order to proceed to organizational learning.
Results suggest that top management staff need to
seriously take the effect of organizational learning into
account and furthermore, to implement this concept in
reality, in order to advance the greater level of customer
service and overall organizational performance and
effectiveness.