Organizational Culture Design for Learning: The Experience of Universitas Terbuka

Abstract

.As a mega university, Open University (UT) has almost 300.000 students. The operation of UT reach throughout Indonesia and abroad. Because of its high complexity, UT need an effective organization. One way for achieving organizational effectiveness of UT is by designing its organizational culture. According to the UT’s Strategic Plan, organizational culture development is directed to adaptive and flexible organizational culture, learning organization (LO), democratic, work guided by the vision and purpose, quality, and competition. The organizational culture is built by implementing the principles of total quality management (TQM) and corporate and good governance (CGG). Organizational culture shaped by the values, norms, assumptions of members of organization. Values, norms, and assumptions developed by the organization to provide a sense of identity, generates organizational commitment to the mission, clarifies and reinforces standards of behavior. Organizational culture is important component for establishing learning organization. Learning organization is now a form of organizational effectiveness. One of effective organizations indicator is its ability to perform learning. This research found that freedom to try a new things, to risk failure, to learn from mistakes, and tolerance to fault encouraged employees to do learning. Other factors that influence organizational learning is skill and experience, personal intimacy, transparency in decision-making, the clarity of the task, and engaging in dialogue for organizational problems solving. Keywords. organizational culture; learning organization; norm; value; philosophy; behaviour.