Organizational learning and capabilities : An integrative conceptual framework

Organizational learning (Bontis, Crossan and Hulland, 2002) and capabilities (Barney, 1991) have been argued to increase performance. Recently, connections have been established between organizational learning and capabilities. On the one hand, learning has been considered as a capability (Hult and Ketchen, 2001; Goh, 2003; Henri, 2006), leading to the idea of “learning capability”. On the other hand, Winter (2000) introduces the “capability learning” idea to emphasize that capabilities are to be learned or developed. This paper proposes an integrative capability-based learning framework aiming to better understand organizational learning, and shortly discusses its cultural implications and the role of belief.