7. Discussion and conclusion
To sum up, based on both qualitative and quantitative research, the results demonstrated that the differential effects of study groups caused by gender, class, seniority, and departmental difference was low. But the comparative effects between the control and experimental groups were significant. The virtual hatchery programs of the study groups did help employees to enhance their abilities in learning and self-growth, and had impacts upon the advancement of coordination, teamwork, communication, organizational cultural change, and organizational performance. The only insignificant sub-dimension was under organization performance: the enhancement of organizational effectiveness. That meant the organizational level's changing effects were not strong enough. This might be because the single-loop changing activity planned for all non-leader members was not yet held on a large scale.
The effectiveness of initiating a learning organization by integrating both adult learning theory and existing organizational learning theories (single-loop and double-loop learning) was also proven to be effective at the end of Firm A's evaluation. Most of the learning organizations had adopted formal training programs. But adult learning theory offered practitioners of learning organizations a deeper-rooted method to change employees' values and beliefs by pulling people together to have face-to-face communication, to listen to each other, to learn from good books, and to share information and feelings with each other. These types of activities were different from the traditional changing modes. Practitioners had been thinking of changing employees' values, beliefs, and trust by offering certain formal classes, in which lecturers tried to "persuade" employees of the importance of learning, communication, and coordination. We called this hard-focus learning, which seemed hard for employees sometimes. With this study, we could look at learning origination from another perspective, in which people were not forced to learn but to learn from contact, listening, and cooperation with others, which we called soft-focus learning.
Most of the organizations adopted formal lectures or knowledge management methods to act as a learning organization, in which human resource departments were mostly assigned to take the leading role for the changing activities. This was the first time an organization used a centralized "device", the virtual hatchery, to control its quality of learning. The quality consistency was proven by this study. Knowledge learning circulated all the time. This matches the core spirit of a learning organization, in which the organization has to be adaptive to the outside competitive world when necessary, without the limitation of routines, norms, and so on.
One of the contributions of this study was a clear depiction of the new changing mode of Firm A. Organizations which have to "persuade" employees to attend the changing programs, might wish to adopt this new changing method, which is softer and is more easily accepted by employees. Employees might feel more interested in attending the classes as they designed the content of the classes themselves. Also, the practice of single-loop and double-loop learning and the relationships between three different levels (individual, departmental, and organizational) were well depicted. The mechanism of transformation between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge was illustrated by this case study, so did the transformation from intuiting, interpreting, integrating, and institution.
To sum up, the central contribution of this work is a model that integrates new components from adult learning theory ([7] Crossan et al. , 1999) into an established framework in the management literature to propose a theoretical link between two previously disconnected constructs (tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge; single-loop and double-loop learning) and put a theoretical model into a practical view. Also, the authors update Crossan et al. 's model to address the question of the impact of leadership style on organizational learning by explaining the mechanism by which leaders' actions facilitate learning.
The research limitation of this study is that there were only 15 interview samples; the research period was not long enough to check the changing effectiveness in the long run. The other limitation is that the theoretical implication is not strong enough as this study is based more on the practical side. So the results of the research will not fulfill the expectations of those who are concerned more about the contribution to theoretical development. But this study does help to integrate and illustrate organizational learning theories into the case. Thus, academic readers and managerial practitioners are able to better understand the mechanisms and key concepts of a learning organization.
For future research, it is suggested that researchers can copy the intervening method introduced in this article either experimentally or by practicing it in other organizations to double-check its effectiveness. Also, the integrating mechanism from tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge and from intuiting to institution can be put to the test in other research.