Publications

2012
Working Paper

An Outside-Inside Evolution in Gender and Professional Work

By: Lakshmi Ramarajan, Kathleen McGinn and Deborah Kolb

We study the process by which a professional service firm reshaped its activities and beliefs over nearly two decades as it adapted to shifts in the social discourse regarding gender and work. Analyzing archival data from the firm over eighteen years and... View Details

Keywords: Professional Service Firms; Social Institutions; Organizational Learning; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Employment; Gender; Society; Service Industry

SSRN

2018
Chapter

The Strategic Imperative of Psychological Safety and Organizational Error Management

By: Amy C. Edmondson and Paul Verdin

Despite discussion in the management literature about agile organizations or learning organizations, many large organizations are top-down, slow to change, and fraught with obstacles to learning. We describe “strategy-as-learning” to contrast with the traditional... View Details

Keywords: Strategy; Learning; Safety; Organizational Culture; Performance Consistency

2015
Working Paper

Coactive Vicarious Learning: Towards a Relational Theory of Vicarious Learning in Organizations

By: Christopher G. Myers

Vicarious learning—a process of individual belief and behavior change that occurs through being exposed to, and making meaning of, another's experience—has long been recognized as a key driver of individual, team and organizational success. Yet existing perspectives on... View Details

Keywords: Organizations; Learning

SSRN

08 Sep 2015
Research & Ideas

Knowledge Transfer: You Can't Learn Surgery By Watching

analogy for vicarious learning is the photocopier,” says Christopher G. Myers, assistant professor of Organizational Behavior at Harvard Business School. The idea: Watch what other people do, make copies of... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Health

Article

Reflections: Toward a Normative and Actionable Theory of Planned Organizational Change and Development

By: Michael Beer

A normative and actionable theory of planned organizational change and development is proposed based on fifty years of engagement by the author as a scholar-consultant. Five principles are central features of the theory and practice proposed: 1) Organizations are... View Details

Keywords: Consultant; Process; Systems; Silence; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Leadership; Learning; Management Teams

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Research Summary

Overview

My research seeks to understand and improve service integration across specialized professions and organizations. A critical idea driving my research is that work is becoming more dynamic, complex and interconnected, particularly for work that addresses difficult... View Details

Keywords: Organization Behavior; Health Care Delivery; Team Effectiveness; Organizational Learning

15 Nov 2006
Research & Ideas

Lessons Not Learned About Innovation

be rediscovered in each managerial generation (about every six years) as a fundamental way to enable new growth. But each generation seems to have forgotten or never learned the mistakes of the past, so we see classic traps repeated over... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

08 Dec 2006
Working Paper Summaries

When Learning and Performance are at Odds: Confronting the Tension

Keywords: by Sara J. Singer & Amy C. Edmondson

2022
Article

Becoming a Learning Organization While Enhancing Performance: The Case of LEGO

By: Thomas Borup Kristensen, Henrik Saabye and Amy Edmondson

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to empirically test how problem-solving lean practices, along with leaders as learning facilitators in an action learning approach, can be transferred from a production context to a knowledge work context for the purpose... View Details

Keywords: Performance Efficiency; Learning; Organizational Change and Adaptation

2020
Working Paper

The Effects of Hierarchy on Learning and Performance in Business Experimentation

By: Sourobh Ghosh, Stefan Thomke and Hazjier Pourkhalkhali

Do senior managers help or hurt business experiments? Despite the widespread adoption of business experiments to guide strategic decision-making, we lack a scholarly understanding of what role senior managers play in firm experimentation. Using proprietary data of live... View Details

Keywords: Experimentation; Innovation; Search; New Product Development; Innovation and Invention; Organizational Design; Learning; Performance

Research Summary

Organisational Learning in Software Requirements Engineering and Management

The current research project addresses the continuing low success rate of software development projects, which has been frequently reported in empirical studies. For example, the 2004 Chaos Report by the Standish Group found that only 29% of 9,236 application... View Details

June 2022 (Revised January 2023)
Case

Buurtzorg

By: Ethan Bernstein, Tatiana Sandino, Joost Minnaar and Annelena Lobb

As co-founders of home nursing company Buurtzorg, Jos de Blok and Gonnie Kronenberg prized both self-management and organizational learning. Buurtzorg’s 10,000 nurses across 950 neighborhood nursing teams in the Netherlands were empowered to manage themselves, both in... View Details

Educators

March 27, 2017
Article

How the Water Industry Learned to Embrace Data

By: Frank V. Cespedes and Amir Peleg

Most current talk about “big data” seems to assume the disintermediation or replacement of physical assets by digital technologies. But a bigger and more impactful trend is the use of online tools to improve physical asset utilization in many traditional off-line... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Analytics and Data Science; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Utilities Industry

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May 2012
Supplement

Columbia's Final Mission (Abridged) (B)

By: Amy C. Edmondson and Kerry Herman

Keywords: Cognitive Biases; Teams; Organizational Learning; Ambiguous Threat; Risk and Uncertainty; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Leadership; Corporate Disclosure; Groups and Teams; Decision Making; Organizational Culture; Public Administration Industry; Aerospace Industry

2008
Chapter

When Learning and Performance Are at Odds: Confronting the Tension

By: Sara Jean Singer and A. C. Edmondson

This chapter explores complexities of the relationship between learning and performance. We start with the general proposition that learning promotes performance and then describe several challenges for researchers and managers who wish to study or promote learning in... View Details

Keywords: Learning; Leadership; Organizational Culture; Performance Improvement; Behavior

1995
Chapter

The Learning Organization: An Integrative Approach

By: A. Edmondson and B. Moingeon

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Design; Integration

Research Summary

Overview

I am interested in the individual experience of learning in organizational settings, particularly how employees learn to learn from the challenging work they do. I am currently researching the role of reflection for raising awareness of learning opportunities that... View Details

Keywords: Learning; Learning And Development; Learning Organizations; Intrinsic Motivation; Reflection; Goal Setting; Performance Measurement; Innovation; Job Design; Biotechnology Industry; Consulting Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry

June 2020
Article

Parallel Play: Startups, Nascent Markets, and the Effective Design of a Business Model

By: Rory McDonald and Kathleen Eisenhardt

Prior research advances several explanations for entrepreneurial success in nascent markets but leaves a key imperative unexplored: the business model. By studying five ventures in the same nascent market, we develop a novel theoretical framework for understanding how... View Details

Keywords: Search; Legitimacy; Organizational Innovation; Organizational Learning; Mechanisms And Processes; Institutional Entrepreneurship; Qualitative Methods; Business Model Design; Business Model; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Emerging Markets; Adaptation; Competition; Strategy

November 2013
Article

Learning from My Successes and from Others' Failures: Evidence from Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery

By: D. KC, B. Staats and F. Gino

Learning from past experience is central to an organization's adaptation and survival. A key dimension of prior experience is whether an outcome was successful or unsuccessful. While empirical studies have investigated the effects of success and failure in... View Details

Keywords: Healthcare; Health Care; Knowledge Work; Attribution Theory; Quality; Success; Medical Specialties; Health Care and Treatment; Failure; Learning; Health Industry