Organizational learning and unlearning capabilities for resilience during COVID-19

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to empirically validate the positive effect of learning on organizational resilience and, within this relationship, understand the role of unlearning in the COVID-19 crisis context and progress the current knowledge about these concepts.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses online survey data from German and Austrian organizations’ employees to test hypotheses derived from frameworks by Duchek (2019), Stephenson (2010) and Fiol and O’Connor (2017). The used questionnaire is built out of three pre-tested questionnaires to increase reliability. Conceptually, this paper takes a capability approach and a process perspective.FindingsThe results support the positive effect of organizational learning on resilience, while rejecting the hypothesized moderating effect of unlearning on this relationship. Organizational learning showed to have a particularly strong positive effect on the adaptive capacity of resilience, compared to organizational resilience overall.Practical implicationsTo build a learning capability for organizational resilience, managers should foster an open system culture in their organization, which aims to be generally open to learn and adapt to be able to withstand adversity. During an organizational crisis, managers have the chance to rebuild organizational structures for better information flow, e.g. implementing formal knowledge management structures.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to empirically test the causal connection between organizational learning and resilience in the Central European context during the COVID-19 crisis. The inclusion of unlearning enriches the discourse about its conceptualizations and fosters future research.