Session 5 Neo (Hao Qiang)

Review group workplace case: compare similarities and differences and develop a table evidencing this.

Zhenjiang Ocean University (ZOU) gets the highest score in three times of comparison. Comparatively, the place I worked for, NOG, an profit education organization, gets the lowest score. ZTS and GM ranked the third and the second higher. Taking the face value of the score, one may tent to conclude that universities in mainland China seem a better learning organization than other profit organizations or companies.

I doubt the conclusion on logical level (Abusing incomplete deduction); even if ZOU is an aberration among slow universities in mainland China, I still doubt the reliability of the evaluation result. There are three reasons.

First, mainland China regime regularly spares comparatively less money in education than its counterparts with similar GDP. Considering the even larger number of students to be educated, less investment would only lead to increasing difficulty in ensuring higher education quality. The common situation of a mainland China university is following the model like this: 1) Getting unsubstantial investment from regime 2) trying to spend all the money from the regime and make money itself, otherwise next year’s budget will be made on this year’s actual spending 3) Reluctant to make any changes and satisfy students’ needs, but eager to push graduates to find jobs. There is no news about ZOU’s particular excellence than other universities (You can Google it). However, private business needs to analyze the market, the customers, and its service/products all the time to survive, besides paying excessively heavy tax. Successful profit organizations and corporations tend to be involved in more learning and change compared with typical mainland China universities.

Second, ZOU may not get the most adequate resources to support its organizational learning/ change from the China regime compared with all universities in that area. Chinese regime classified universities into different levels, and only those classifies as first level ones could get relatively adequate resources to sustain their organizational learning and change. Unfortunately, ZOU may not belong to those universities who get a bigger share every year.

Third, different group member’s evaluation standard is quite different from each other. The answer to every question to the survey is determined largely by personal understanding and attitude. If I were evaluate my previous university (though it is viewed as a first-class mainland China university), I probably give it much lower score, even than that of NOG. I believe the “Learning Organization Survey” would be more useful if it is used in finding staff’s general opinion about organization learning performance of a particular organization rather than comparison between different organizations even in different industry.