Abstract
This study examines how recombinant innovation is affected by member turnover and organizational learning within a corporate hierarchy. Prior work has overlooked the role of organizational structure in organizational learning, focusing instead on the knowledge provided by individual new hires or on the disruption caused by individual departures. We address this gap by applying March’s [March JG (1991) Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning. Organ. Sci. 2(1):71–87.] mutual learning model to a corporate hierarchy. In doing so, we theorize how the contributions of corporate staff to socializing new employees and to learning from the organizational code may differ from those of the organization’s subunit members. Empirically, we examine the learning effects of aggregate corporate and subunit arrivals and departures on novel recombinant innovation by subunits. Using 24 years of Motorola company directories, we construct membership turnover measures for corporate and subunit employees and exploit patent data to capture recombinant innovation. Our results suggest that, whereas the influx of new ideas through arrivals may be critical, breaking the pattern of inertial behavior through departures is more important for recombinant innovation. Corporate departures matter most for recombinant innovation, a result that reflects not only corporate staff’s slower individual learning from the organizational code but also its ability to update that code more quickly. In supplementary analyses, we find different effects for technical and nontechnical staff and internal and external arrivals, as well as demonstrate the mutual learning mechanism using internal corporate documents to capture code change. Our study has strong implications for theories of organizational learning, strategic human capital, organization design, and innovation.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1332-1352 |
| Number of pages | 21 |
| Journal | Organization Science |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - May 2023 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:They thank Sue Topp, Manager, Motorola Solutions Heritage Communications & Archives at Motorola Solutions, Inc., for her insights and cooperation in data collection. The authors thank participants at the 2020 Carnegie School of Organizational Learning Conference, 2019 Carnegie Conference in Honor of Jim March, 2018 Consortium for Strategy Research, 2018 Strategy Science Conference, 2018 Consortium for Competitiveness and Cooperation, 2018 Academy of Management Annual Meeting, 2017 Strategic Management Society Annual Conference, and 2017 Managerial and Organizational Cognition–Technology and Innovation Management Conference, and seminar participants at INSEAD, China Europe International Business School, Boston College, 2018 Consortium for Research in Strategy (CRS) Conference, and University of California, Irvine, for their insightful comments and guidance. The authors also thank John Lee for his excellent work on data cleaning and coding. This study was supported by the Center for Organizational Research at the University of California, Irvine. The authors contributed equally and are listed in alphabetical order.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Informs.
Keywords
- innovation
- knowledge
- organizational code
- organizational design
- organizational learning
- organizational structure
- recombination
- strategic human resources
- turnover
