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

Peter M. Madsen () and Vinit Desai ()
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Peter M. Madsen: Management Department, Marriott School of Business, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah 84602
Vinit Desai: Management Discipline, CU Denver Business School, University of Colorado, Denver, Denver, Colorado 80204

Organization Science, 2018, vol. 29, issue 4, 739-753

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: population-level learning; organizational learning; regulators; organizational populations; organizational environments; airline accidents (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ororsc:v:29:y:2018:i:4:p:739-753

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