Almost identical experience biases in vicarious learning

Article Type: Abstracts From: Development and Learning in Organizations, Volume 27, Issue 1

Mitsuhashi H. Industrial & Corporate Change, August 2012, Vol. 21 No. 4, Start page: 837, No. of pages: 33

While previous research on vicarious learning assumes that managers pay adequate attention to any event in an environment, boundedly rational managers can only pay selective attention to salient events. This study proposes the hypothesis that managers pay disproportionately less attention to and learn less from an external event if it has attributes almost identical to those that they have encountered in the past in either a direct or an indirect manner. An analysis of errors by Japanese firms operating nuclear power plants supports this theory and presents an explanation about why an organization repeats an error that others have made in the past. ISSN: 0960-6491 Article type: Research paper Reference: 41AT420

Keywords: Experience, Japan, Nuclear power plants,Organizational change, Organizational learning