Take Your Time? How Activity Timing Affects Organizational Learning and Performance Outcomes

Abstract

Organizational learning theory has long examined how organizations learn to perform better as they accumulate experience. Although experience accumulation is inherently related to the timing of the repeated activities carried out by an organization, the direct relationship between activity timing and organizational learning has not been examined explicitly in the literature and remains an open question. Organizational learning theory contains two competing perspectives on how timing should impact learning—one suggesting that iterating faster is better for learning and one suggesting that taking more time between iterations is more helpful. Here, we reconcile these perspectives and develop a theory about the boundary conditions between them, arguing that, in general, iterating more rapidly enhances learning but that iterations of novel or complex activities, or ones following recent failure, benefit from a slower pace. We conduct tests of this theoretical perspective using data from the entire history of the orbital satellite launch industry from 1957–2017, and we find broad support for our theory and hypotheses.