Authors
Amy C Edmondson, Anita Williams Woolley
Publication date
2003/7/9
Journal
International handbook of organizational learning and knowledge management. London: Blackwell
Pages
185-211
Description
Organizational learning interventions, like other planned change efforts, often fail to meet their stated goals. This chapter suggests that part of this failure is due to a tendency to evaluate success or failure as a dichotomous, organization-level outcome. We argue instead that change initiatives can reach different degrees of success in different parts of an organization, depending on interpersonal context. Early work on organizational change suggested that psychological safety is a critical factor in reducing resistance and enabling people to cope with change. Recent research has shown that psychological safety varies significantly across work groups in the same organization. Building on these observations, we theorize that the same organizational learning intervention can achieve different results across organizational groups due to variance in psychological safety. To further explore this proposition, we investigated outcomes of a change program designed to promote organizational learning in a large manufacturing company. The study sheds light on why different parts of an organization might have different responses to the same program. We discuss implications for research and practice related to organizational learning interventions.
Total citations
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Scholar articles
AC Edmondson, AW Woolley - International handbook of organizational learning and …, 2003