Benchmarking and learning organizations: ranking methods to identify “best in class”

The benchmarking analysis of organizational learning capability considers a set of criteria: clarity of purposes and mission, leadership commitment and empowerment, experimentation and rewards, transfer of knowledge, teamwork of group problem solving, etc. For this reason it assumes the configuration of a multicriteria analysis. In the traditional benchmarking the multicriteria problem is solved throughout the construction of a synthetic indicator obtained by averaging all scores assigned to an organization on the different criteria. This methodology presents many theoretical and empirical disadvantages. This paper illustrates the advantages, in terms of greater flexibility and realism, connected to the application of the multicriteria methodology founded on the notion of outranking. In fact, such a methodology solves the multicriteria benchmarking problem without using the averaging rule adopted by the traditional benchmarking approach.