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1. Introduction
The field of organizational learning (OL) and knowledge management (KM) has received the attention of researchers and practitioners in the past 20 years and will grow continuously in the next 10 years (Easterby-Smith and Lyles, 2011). The main reason behind the growth of this field is the contribution of knowledge workers in the growth of knowledge economy. As Drucker (1999) has emphasized that knowledge workers' productivity is the great challenge of this century and identifying it as the true competitive edge of a global economy. Therefore, organizations need to focus on the concept of OL to promote KM in the present era whether it is public or private sector, and small or large organizations. Current studies support the impact of OL culture on job satisfaction, commitment and customer satisfaction (e.g. Tseng, 2010; Pantouvakis and Bouranta, 2013; Chang and Lee, 2007; Rai, 2011).
Moreover, current literature on KM has shown its usefulness in various sectors and industries, for example, the public sector (Ferguson et al. , 2013), non-governmental organizations (Corfield et al. , 2013), banking industry, (Oluikpe, 2012), small- to medium-sized enterprises, (Durst and Edvardsson, 2012), manufacturing organizations (Birasnav and Rangnekar, 2010), and human service and professional services firms (Palte et al. , 2011); and life insurance business (Huang et al. , 2011). Most of these studies demonstrate the relevance of KM practices; however, there are limited empirical studies, which explore the antecedents of KM practices especially in a large heavy engineering public sector organization in an emerging economic context such as India. So, this study is aimed to contribute to the literature by exploring the relationship between OL, KM and firm performance in an engineering organization.
2. Conceptual background
2.1 Organizational learning
The concept of OL is a well-researched topic in a range of academic disciplines from economics, management science, psychology and sociology to anthropology (Easterby-Smith and Lyles, 2011). During 1990s, several organizations experimented with restructuring and reengineering to learn new ways to operate more efficiently and effectively. OL is a vital process for organizations to manage the growth by developing new and improved core competences. Senge (1990) stated that the speed of OL may become the only sustainable source of competitive advantage in the future. In a learning organization:
[...] people continually...