Team Learning and Collaboration: The Central Common Ground of Organisational Culture and Learning Culture. The Case of the Greek Postal Public and Private Sector

The crucial and vital objective of this thesis is to assess the extent to which team learning and collaboration are promoted or hindered by the organisational culture of public and private organisations. To this end, the thesis explores the literature overlaps between the concepts of organisational and learning culture and finds that the central common denominator of these concepts is the "team learning and collaboration‟ characteristic. Two Greek organisations in the postal sector, one public and one private, were involved in this research. The selection of this sector was defined by the liberalisation of the postal market, which took place on 1st January 2013. A key research question is how the organisations under investigation use their „team learning and collaboration‟ characteristic to prepare for the open market. This implies an uncertainty in terms of distinguishing the extent to which such learning and collaboration takes place. The adopted research methodology consists of mixed methods research including a quantitative questionnaire and qualitative semi-structured interviews. This study provides an insight into the understanding of organisational culture and learning culture. It concludes by arguing that the bureaucratic organisational culture of the public organisation hinders team learning and collaboration, whilst the supportive organisational culture of the private organisation promotes them. This study also demonstrates the individual and organisation-level factors that promote or inhibit team learning and collaboration. In effect, these findings indicate whether or not organisational learning is achieved in the public and private organisation. This study is unique in the sense that no previous research has yet to employ the “team learning and collaboration‟ characteristic to the postal industry. One can also generalise beyond the organisations investigated. Thus, theoretical and practical inferences can be drawn from this research.