Organizational Learning: Subprocess Identification, Construct Validation, and an Empirical Test of Cultural Antecedents

摘要

Organizational learning is key to an organization's capability for continuous change and renewal. As a result, scholarly interest in identifying the antecedents of organizational learning has greatly increased over the past couple of decades. This study focuses on (1) identifying and measuring the distinct subprocesses that make up the organizational learning construct to obtain a more detailed understanding of the construct and (2) exploring the effect that organizational culture and, more particularly, four dimensions of culture-participative decision making, openness, learning orientation, and transformational leadership-have on each of the organizational learning subprocesses. The authors use two samples of subject matter experts and the responses of 631 managers to test their propositions. Their results yielded five independent but interrelated subprocesses-information acquisition, information distribution, information interpretation, knowledge integration, and organizational memory. Furthermore, their results indicate that the four different cultural antecedents studied have different kinds of significant relationships with each of the organizational learning subprocesses. This study contributes to the literature on organizational learning by identifying and validating the organizational learning subprocesses, and by offering a detailed picture of the relationship between key organizational antecedents to learning and the individual subprocesses of learning. In addition, since they use systematic and thorough methodological techniques to develop an instrument to test, measure, and validate those subprocesses of learning that constitute a common body of knowledge in this area, the authors' instrument could prove to be a valuable tool for future research.