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1. Introduction
Knowledge has been recognised as essential to help firms to compete. It becomes essential to continue developing and managing company knowledge in order to keep abreast of continuing change from the internal and external environment ([11] Davenport and Prusak, 1998; [27] Jarrar, 2002) and to gain advantages ([31] Lee, 2000). [12] Demarest (1997) advises that the degree to which knowledge management (KM) is beneficial to an organisation depends on the following six factors:
management culture pertaining to the value and purpose of knowledge;
how knowledge is created, transferred, and used in the company;
the benefits expected to come about from KM;
the existing level of KM systems at the company;
the methods used to institute KM; and
the level to which information technology will be applied within the KM system.
[20] Gupta et al. (2000) add that KM benefits should be measured through customer satisfaction, financial indices, innovation metrics, among others.
The organisations that learn fastest and use knowledge most effectively are most likely to become and remain leaders ([41] Pemberton and Stonehouse, 2000; [54] Smith, 2008). The concepts of KM are integrally linked with organisational learning (OL), and both play a role in the operation or establishment of a learning organisation (LO) and a chaordic organisation (CO) (or chaordic enterprise (CE)) (following [59], [60] van Eijnatten and Putnik (2004a, b)). [49] Senge (1992) defines LO as "organisations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to learn together". There are five synergistic disciplines which define the ideal LO and he insists that these five ingredients (namely, personal mastery, team mastery, mental models, shared vision, and systems thinking) must be present if OL is to thrive.
Evolving from organisation learning, many researchers (e.g. [18] Fitzgerald and van Eijnatten (2002), [43] Putnik (2009) and [61] van Eijnatten et al. (2007)) advocated the chaordic system thinking (CST) as a model for complexity and learning management in organisations towards (organisational) sustainability. A CO/CE is a sustainable organisation, where CST is providing the capabilities to survive crisis situations. According to [61] van Eijnatten et al. (2007), CST is characterised by...