Do Organizational Routines Change as Experience Changes?

Abstract

This article addresses the question: How can one understand the dynamics involved in translating experience into organizational routines? In the pursuit of such understanding, the article examines two dynamic threats to the relationship between experience and routines. The results suggest that these threats interrelate with how multiple actors interact in an organizational context. This interrelation constitutes different learning processes. One type of learning is associated with heedful interaction—where organizational routines become a source of exploration and adaptiveness. The other type of learning is associated with heedless interaction—where routines become a source of exploitation, inertia, and carelessness. The data used in approaching the research question are from a longitudinal research project that illustrates how multiple actors in an organization generate and change routines in the face of changing experience.

Staying on Track: A Voyage to the Internal Mechanisms of Routine Reproduction

“…Reproduction mechanisms evolve and strengthen with use of the routine. The way this happens is quite underexplored at this point (a few initial explorations can be found in Espedal, 2006), but it seems likely that it happens in different ways for each mechanism. Habitualization is strengthened when recurrent passes through the routine intensify familiarity.…”

“…The fourth prediction is thus: the larger the number of prior passes through the routine, the more likely that action will stay on track during the current pass. It is conceivable that this relationship is non-linear or even nonmonotonic, for example, repeated passes through a routine can create burn out (exemplified in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times) or even give rise to forces that encourage straying off track when members figure out how to play the system or engage in conflict among themselves (e.g., Crozier, 1964;Espedal, 2006). The effects of such complications will have to be explored in future research.…”

Maneuvering Space for Leadership

“…Experience-based knowledge (learning from one's own and others' experience) can unleash the dilemma between stability and flexibility. Rules contain insight and understanding that have been created through previous experience and are changed on the basis of new experience (Espedal, 2006;Levitt & March, 1988). By the translation of experience into rules, conditions that define leadership maneuvering space and conditions that define the leadership's logic of action are changed at the same time.…”

Internationalization process, impact of slack resources, and role of the CEO: The duality of structure and agency in evolution of cross-border acquisition decisions

“…In effect, Pentland and Feldman (2005) suggest that by embodying possibilities for both stability and change, routines serve the combination of rules as well as resources. For example, compared with ostensive or abstract depictions of routines as rule-based, efficient, repetitive interactions in organizations, a performative depiction suggests routines are inherently improvisational, requiring members to engage with reflection and mindfulness (Feldman and Pentland, 2003), leading to double-loop organizational learning through ''heedful interaction'' (Espedal, 2006). Thus, ''internationalization journeys .…”