Development of network measures for knowledge processes: a relational framework

Abstract

Organizational learning has received increasing attention from scholars for mainly three reasons - debate about the level of analysis, questions about existing organizational theories, and concerns over a robust methodology for measuring learning process. Previous studies have strongly recommended researchers to give more attention towards relationships between people and how those relationships affect people in the organizational learning process. To address these concerns and gaps in literature, a process-based view of organizational learning is adopted consisting of four distinct subprocesses - information acquisition, information distribution, information interpretation, and organizational memory. This study advances the measurement of organizational learning process using social network analysis and develops measures of organizational learning subprocesses that are multilevel and are able to provide a snapshot of the current process of organizational learning within the organization. This study using a multi-theoretical, multilevel perspective to examine organizational learning networks has important implications for methodological advances and managerial practices.