Organizational Unlearning: An Empirical Study in the Federal University of Santa Catarina

Abstract

While organizations acquire new knowledge, a process called organizational learning, they also discard obsolete knowledge, a process called organizational unlearning. Organizational unlearning focuses on the disposal of old routines to make way for new ones, and its study has received limited attention from research. Thus, due to the need for greater understanding of the unlearning process, the study presented here aims to describe the organizational unlearning process in a public organization, a context even less studied than private organizations. For this, support by the theory of organizational routines, we used field research to describe the organizational unlearning process in one of Colleges of the Federal University of Santa Catarina. Among other things, changes were found to act as levers for organizational unlearning, and organizational learning and unlearning are closely linked through the introduction and disposal of organizational routines.

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