Achieving Corporate Competitiveness: The Establishment of Learning Organisation in a Life Insurance Company

ABSTRACT: As an industry providing protection, financial services and financial solution, life insurance plays an active role of informational transformation, which serves to improve the management of all resources in the companies. Obviously, the human resources management practices have a big opportunity to play an important role in supporting the industry to gain the competitive advantage. Human resources management practices, through their learning activities will establish learning organisation, cultivate it and eventually attain the desired competitive advantage. Since a learning organisation is characterised by an efficient organisation in transforming their internal and external resources, it is critical to study on how a life insurance company does the transformation through knowledge and learning activities following Senge‟s theory on the learning organisation (Senge, 2004). Through a comprehensive the utilisation of Resource-Based View, Learning Organisation and Sustainable Competitiveness Advantage theories, a quantitative approach is conducted at Sun Life Financial Indonesia, a dynamic and fast-growing life insurance company. The research tests five hypotheses, which cover the areas of: (1) the influence of mental model of the leader, (2) the influence of building shared vision, (3) the influence of Team Learning, (4) the influence of System Thinking and (5) the influence of Personal Mastery. Based on the research, the study illustrates positive impacts on four hypotheses and a negative impact on the fifth hypothesis. The values above show that all hypotheses have different factor loadings, which are needed for Sun Life Financial Indonesia’s continuous process of Learning Organisation. Those are referring to the study on the Learning Organisation in general to the dimension of personal mastery and building shared vision, which have higher affinity on the organisational competitive advantage. In general, the organisation needs to maintain its Learning Organisation as a part of its HR Strategy. The study provides a set of suggestion which covers the areas of: (1) The on-going careful maintenance of its organisational strategy to attain various sustainable business improvements, (2) The continuous acceleration to produce more talents through its High Performance Culture, and (3) The continuous exercise of Learning Organisation efforts through utilisation of development and career frameworks.
KEYWORDS: Life Insurance, Human Resources, Learning Organisation, Competitive Advantage, Transformation