No Firm Is an Island: The Role of Population-Level Actors in Organizational Learning from Failure

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Madsen, Peter M.; Desai, Vinit
• 署名单位: Brigham Young University; University of Colorado System; University of Colorado Denver
• 刊物名称: ORGANIZATION SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1047-7039
• DOI: 10.1287/orsc.2017.1199
• 发表日期: 2018
• 页码: 739-753
• 关键词: population-level learning; Organizational learning; regulators; ORGANIZATIONAL POPULATIONS; ORGANIZATIONAL ENVIRONMENTS; airline accidents

摘要

When a serious failure occurs within a population of organizations, members of individual organizations in the population attempt to learn vicariously from the event so that future failures may be avoided. This organization-level vicarious learning process has been extensively studied in the organizational learning literature. However, following a serious failure in one organization, a parallel process also plays out at the population level as population-level actors draw lessons from the failure and exert influence over organizations in the population in the interest of preventing future failures. Such population-level processes may exert powerful influences on organization-level learning, but have only begun to be explored in the literature. This paper begins to fill this gap by theorizing and studying the role of population-level actors in organizational learning from failure within and across organizational populations. It examines these issues in a global sample of large airlines operating between 1981 and 2011. The findings indicate that population-level forces are a major driver of improvement and learning in members of organizational populations-specifically, that the monitoring strength and activity of population-level actors influence the rates of organizational learning from failure within their populations.