Caught in culture? How interaction between organizational culture and learning causes patterns in organizational culture change

Description

Organizational culture must constantly adapt to fit changes in the environment and organizational knowledge. Extant literature analyzes how sudden events such as environmental jolts, threats or strate-gic cultural molding may change organizational culture, but the literature largely neglects gradual, longitudinal changes to organizational culture. This paper presents an analysis of organizational cul-ture change as a longitudinal organizational learning process. We use unique longitudinal data from 38 firms collected in 2006 and 2018 to analyze how the initial organizational culture and organizational learning change organizational culture. Our findings show that organizations with different organizational cultures go through different organizational culture changes, while organizations with similar organizational cultures display similar organizational culture changes. This indicates that an organization’s initial culture functions as a pattern for both learning and changes in organizational culture. Even when exposed to similar environmental development, organizations are so to speak caught in culture. Our findings contribute to the literature on both organizational learning and organizational culture with a much-needed integration of these into related perspectives on organizational knowledge.

Period	10 Jun 2023 → 12 Jun 2023
Event title	DRUID : summer conference
Event type	Conference
Location	Lisbon, PortugalShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International