Organizational learning subprocess identification, construct validation, and an empirical test of cultural antecedents

Organizational learning is key to an organization’s capability for continuous change and renewal. As a result, scholarly interest in identifying the antecedents of organizational learning has greatly increased over the past couple of decades. This study focuses on (1) identifying and measuring the distinct subprocesses that make up the organizational learning construct to obtain a more detailed understanding of the construct and (2) exploring the effect that organi-zational culture and, more particularly, four dimensions of culture—participative decision making, openness, learning orientation, and transformational leadership—have on each of the organizational learning subprocesses. The authors use two samples of subject matter experts and the responses of 631 managers to test their propositions. Their results yielded five indepen-dent but interrelated subprocesses—information acquisition, information distribution, informa-tion interpretation, knowledge integration, and organizational memory. Furthermore, their results Acknowledgement: This article was accepted under the editorship of Talya N. Bauer. The first author wishes to thank Professor Martha Van Haitsma, director of the University of Chicago Survey Lab, for her guidance and support in the early stages of this research project