Cognitive and behavioral learning in organizational change

More than thirty years after Argyris and Schön (1978) dedicated a book to the subject, organizational learning theories still have difficulties to elaborate a common vocabulary and definitions set. Following Argyris and Schön seminal work, some management researchers and psycho-sociologists emphasized the cognitive aspects of organizational learning, trying to determine the best organizational practices that should be implemented in a group. On the other hand, behavioral and evolutionist economists are studying organizational learning by focusing on routines, seen as practices that are used tacitly by a team in order to solve a recurrent problem. In this paper, we aim to conciliate these two conceptions of organizational learning by showing that, unlike the psycho-sociologists say, organizational learning and organizational change must be seen as the two sides of the same idea, and unlike behavioral economists say, the role of collective intentions and collective psychology appears to be determinant if one wants to understand the specific dynamics of any organizational learning process