Organizational Learning Mechanisms: A Structural and Cultural Approach to Organizational Learning

This article presents a two-faceted (structural and cultural) approach to organizational learning. The structural facet focuses on organizational learning mechanisms, which are institutionalized structural and procedural arrangements allowing organizations to systematically collect, analyze, store, disseminate, and use information that is relevant to the performance of the organization. The cultural facet focuses on the shared values, without which these mechanisms are likely to be enacted as rituals rather than as means to detect and correct error. The authors describe how this proposed approach deals with the problem of anthropomorphism in organizational learning and discuss its utility for researching organizational learning and for introducing it into organizations.