No Firm Is an Island: The Role of Population-Level Actors in Organizational Learning from Failure

When a serious failure occurs within a population of organizations, members of individual organizations in the population attempt to learn vicariously from the event so that future failures may be avoided. This organization-level vicarious learning process has been extensively studied in the organizational learning literature. However, following a serious failure in one organization, a parallel process also plays out at the population level as population-level actors draw lessons from the failure and exert influence over organizations in the population in the interest of preventing future failures. Such population-level processes may exert powerful influences on organization-level learning, but have only begun to be explored in the literature. This paper begins to fill this gap by theorizing and studying the role of population-level actors in organizational learning from failure within and across organizational populations. It examines these issues in a global sample of large airlines operating between 1981 and 2011. The findings indicate that population-level forces are a major driver of improvement and learning in members of organizational populations—specifically, that the monitoring strength and activity of population-level actors influence the rates of organizational learning from failure within their populations.