Management Practices and Collective Learning: An Empirical Study in a Global Pharmaceutical Firm

What are the management practices that foster collective learning within an organization? A lack of integration between the organizational learning and human resource management literatures means that this important question remains unanswered. Based on a study of 961 employees in 72 worldwide departments of a global pharmaceuticals company, we map the contextual dimensions of discipline, stretch, support and trust onto specific management practices, and use structural equation modelling to show how these practices relate to each of three stages in the collective learning process. We find that discipline and stretch primarily enhance codification behaviors, but without support and trust the groups may not engage in the first two critical stages of experimentation and reflective communications. We thus offer an explanation for why all dimensions are essential for collective learning. Finally, we demonstrate that top-down communications is an important predictor of all stages of learning, with both direct and mediated effects.