Motivating Organizations to Learn

Organizations must learn and adapt to succeed in today’s ever-changing business environment, so it is essential for scholars to better understand the antecedents to learning processes among individuals, teams, and organizations as a whole. In this article, the authors offer a multilevel theory that illustrates how individuals’ motivation for different achievement goals, that is, goal orientations, shape the way they individually and collectively participate in organizational learning processes. This framework is grounded in a theoretical synthesis of organizational learning and achievement goal theories, which highlights the value of using an emergent motivational theory to better understand how predominantly cognitive learning processes may emerge across levels in organizations. In particular, the authors illustrate how mastery- and performance-oriented norms emerge in work groups and influence information interpretation and integration. The authors further describe how groups’ goal orientation norms can become embedded in the organizational culture, which impacts the ways in which learning processes are institutionalized throughout the organization. This theoretical framework provides a fuller depiction of why and how learning unfolds in organizations, which may facilitate future research on the microfoundations of organizational learning and how these can enable organizations to enhance their capabilities.