Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management, Second Edition

The Nature of Organizational Learning

To explore the interrelationship between organizational identity and learning more deeply, it is first necessary to articulate our perspective on the nature of organizational learning. Similar to our arguments that organizational identity is more than just a collective version of individual identity (Corley et al., 2000), we believe that some types of organizational learning are more than just a collective version of individual learning.

Weick (1991) clearly articulates the strength of this position in his assertion that depicting organizational learning as following the same processes as individual learning limits our ability to gain insight into the phenomenon as a distinctive process in its own right. In its essence, Weick’s argument contends that individual-level psychological theories of learning do not adequately describe the organizational learning process because the assumptions underlying those theories do not hold for organizations—organizations are a different type of entity than individuals and interact with environments differently than individuals. To depict organizations as learning the same way that individuals do results in an overly micro-centric view that does not do justice to the unique nature of organizational learning as a macro concept.

Weick and Westley (1999) further support this perspective in their citing of Normann’s (1985) and Argote and McGrath’s (1993) work. These researchers embed organizational learning in ...