Learning-by-Moving: Can Reconfiguring Spatial Proximity Between Organizational Members Promote Individual-level Exploration?

The author sincerely thanks senior editor Matthew Bidwell and the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. The author is particularly grateful to his doctoral dissertation committee members, Phanish Puranam, Philipp Meyer-Doyle, Gabriel Szulanski, and Linda Argote, for their exceptional support and guidance. The author is also indebted to Brandy Aven, Guoli Chen, Jason Davis, Rory Eckardt, Martin Gargiulo, Henrich Greve, Oliver Hahl, Alessandro Iorio, Daniel Keum, Joon Mahn Lee, Yonghoon Lee, Chris Liu, Daniel Mack, Jasjit Singh, and Ramon Lecuona Torras for their valuable input on this paper. Finally, the author thanks the presentation participants at INSEAD, ESADE, Seoul National University, Korea University, the University of Texas at Austin, the National University of Singapore, HKUST, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Carnegie Mellon University, New York University, the University of Colorado at Denver, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the 2017 Carnegie School of Learning Conference, the 2017 AOM Conference, Purdue University, and the 2017 Journal of Organization Design Conference for their helpful comments. An earlier version of this paper, titled “The Organizational Design of Spatial Proximity and Its Influence on Organizational Learning: Evidence from a Natural Experiment,” was the recipient of the William H. Newman Award for Best Paper Based on a Dissertation and the Business Policy and Strategy Division Distinguished Student Paper Award at the 2017 Academy of Management Conference.