Organizational unlearning context fostering learning for customer capital through time: lessons from smes in the telecommunications industry

Abstract

In situations where organizations and their members face changing environments it is necessary that old knowledge represented in processes and routines be challenged prior to the addition of new knowledge. It could be claimed that for learning to occur on an organizational level it must be possible for unlearning to take place. However, there have been few, if any, studies providing direct empirical evidence for this relationship. In the analysis presented in this paper we explicitly include time as a variable in order to model a situation where unlearning at time (t0) in order to learn more efficiently at a moment after occurs prior to time (t1). In addition, we also examine the relationship between organizational learning and customer capital. These relationships are examined through an empirical investigation of 107 Spanish small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) from the Telecommunications industry. The results indicate that the effect of the unlearning at a moment (t0) on customer capital at a moment (t1) is depends on whether the learning taking place at (t1) can be characterized as either exploration or exploitation.