Promotions, temporary assignments, and planned efforts to transfer best practices are some of the myriad reasons why employees increasingly move within and across contemporary organizations. At the same time, compared to other learning mechanisms, individuals have unique capabilities for conveying knowledge and adapting it to new contexts. Accordingly, this chapter examines how and when the movement of individuals into organizational units influences learning. From a review of personnel movement in the organizational learning literature and learning in the team receptivity to newcomer literature, we uncover general tendencies in how personnel movement influences learning processes and key moderators of these effects. Centered on points of convergence and divergence, we present an overarching theoretical viewpoint on when personnel movement is most likely to result in learning that integrates across the two literatures, noting what each can learn from the other. The chapter concludes by outlining managerial implications.
Rethinking organizational learning: analyzing learning processes of information system designers
