Essays on Organizational Learning Processes and Outcomes in Healthcare

In my dissertation, consisting of three chapters, I investigate how various mechanisms jointly affect organizational learning in the healthcare sector. The first chapter provides a review of the literature on organizational learning, focusing on how different factors impact four distinct organizational learning processes: search, knowledge creation, retention, and transfer. By categorizing past findings, I identify how the same factor may promote or hinder different organizational learning processes and encourage a more detailed examination of how multiple mechanisms interact to affect organizational learning. 

In the second chapter, I examine the relationship between individuals' repeated failures and learning. Through a theoretical framework and empirical analysis of cardiothoracic surgeons in U.S. hospitals, I demonstrate an inverted U-shaped relationship between the number of failures and learning. I find that individuals give up learning after a certain number of failures because their motivation to learn decreases despite increasing learning opportunities. This research aims to reconcile inconsistent findings from the literature on individual failure learning and provides insights into the non-monotonic relationship between failure experiences and individual learning. 

In the third chapter, I explore the impact of contractor employment on organizational learning in terms of adopting an industry's new best practices. Using archival data on heart disease patients in U.S. hospitals, where physicians worked as contractors or full-time employees, I find evidence that organizational learning peaks at a moderate proportion of contractors. I theorize that the integration of diverse knowledge held by contractors and firm-specific knowledge held by full-time employees is most effective at this point. This research contributes to the understanding of how a firm's human capital resource composition affects knowledge transfer and organizational learning—an important topic in light of the rising population of contingent workers. 

Overall, this dissertation contributes to the literature on organizational learning and the microfoundations of organizational capabilities.