Improvisation and Learning in Organizations— An Opportunity for Future Empirical Research

Abstract

Since the mid 1990s improvisation in organizations has attracted increasingly more attention from scholars of organizations, but in Management Learning, articles investigating learning and improvisation in organizations are absent, even if reviews of the literature on organizational improvisation suggest close links between the two concepts. Hence, there appears to be room for scholars to pursue empirical studies of connections between improvisation and learning in organizations, and thus, the purpose of this article is to provide inspiration for production and publication of such studies in Management Learning. First, the article presents a commonly accepted definition of improvisation. Thereafter, it looks at connections between improvisation and learning in organizations, and it describes recent empirical research investigating relationships between learning and improvisation in organizations. It then addresses challenges facing scholars of improvisation and learning in organization, and finally, it identifies interesting organizational contexts for empirical studies of improvisation and learning in organizations.

Organizational Improvisation: A Consolidating Review and Framework

“…The mainstream business literature often draws parallels from jazz to organizational creativity and flexibility (Kao 1996a). Jazz can also contribute to other fields of management , including: change management (Barrett and Hatch 2003;Mantere et al 2007;Orlikowski 1996); learning and knowledge capture (Crossan and Sorrenti 2002;King and Ranft 2001;Miner et al 2001;Vendelø 2009); new product development (Eisenhardt and Tabrizi 1995;Kamoche and Cunha 2001;Moorman and Miner 1998a;Sutton and Hargadon 1996); organizational adaptation and renewal (Brown and Eisenhardt 1997;Crossan et al 1996); strategic decision-making Holbrook 2007); technology use and related change (Orlikowski and Hofman 1997); outsourcing (Silva 2002); negotiation (Balachandra et al 2005;Wheeler and Morris 2002); social intrapreneurism (Grayson et al 2014) and management education (Meyer and Shambu 2010). Our understanding of OI resulting from the jazz metaphor can also enrich and inform parallel and tangential streams of research (e.g.…”

Conceptualizing cold disasters: Disaster risk governance at the Arctic edge

“…Complex problem solving within a constrained timeframe often calls for improvisation, which Moorman & Miner [35] define as: "…the degree to which the composition and execution converge in time." Hence, although Ciborra [36] argues that "the effective improviser never seems to be worried by (a lack of) time; she just acts at the appropriate time", in reality it is the lack of time to solve com-plex problems that leads people to improvise [37]. Furthermore, although disasters and accidents can be and are planned for, they seldom happen as imagined, thus improvisation becomes a necessity when dealing with them [38,39].…”

Five Frames to Promote Innovative Business Education: Lessons Learned from the Art and Science of Improv

“…Jim, I love your improvisational works! Authors such as Peter Vaill () and Morton Vendelø () use improv as a metaphor for how both managing and learning need to take place in a fast‐changing world. Yet, as you improvise, it seems like there is considerable structure and mutual understanding going on amongst the musicians.…”