Ignorant Decision Making and Educated Inertia: Some Political Pathologies of Organizational Learning

Studies of failures in organizational information gathering, learning, and decision making highlight psychological and institutional causes. However, organizations are also political coalitions that face internal contestation over strategies, policies, and goals. The decision of whether to collect information impacts both the goals that organization members try to meet and the organization’s capacity to meet them. This paper develops a formal model that introduces political conflict into a theory of organizational learning. The model has a key insight: organizations characterized by political conflict will forego learning when leaders do not need to learn to build consensus in support of change, and will learn when leaders are unable to build such a consensus without learning. As a result, political conflict leads organizations to implement changes without first learning and to frequently learn when no changes are forthcoming. These tendencies toward ignorant decision making and educated inertia will be more pronounced when environmental variability is high, when learning about existing policies does not also teach about potential policy alternatives, and when organization members are risk averse. The model offers predictions about pathological learning behaviors that are consistent with considerable prior qualitative research. These patterns cannot be produced by experiential learning models in which political conflict is not present.

The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1164.