Learning when Organizing: The Influence of Interactions on Learning at Work1

This paper addresses the question: "Is learning influenced by structural properties of interactions in an organization?" The organization chosen to study the question is a publicly owned pharmaceutical company in Sweden. Four districts consisting of 5-7 pharmacies each were selected for the study (including all 226 employees.) Three of these districts have undergone change efforts and formed into three distinct organizational types. The material gathered consists of the answers from a questionnaire used in a study of Collective Learning. By employing methods from Social Network Theory, a structural component was extracted and correlated with learning variables. As the result from this study shows, structural properties of interactions are correlated with individuals ’ learning at work, but that the four districts display individual variances