Retentivity beats prior knowledge as predictor for the acquisition and adaptation of new production processes

In the time of digitalization the demand for organizational change is rising and demands ways to cope with fundamental changes on the organizational as well as individual level. As a basis, learning and forgetting mechanisms need to be understood in order to guide a change process efficiently and successfully. Our research aims to get a better understanding of individual differences and mechanisms in the change context by performing an experiment where individuals learn and later re-learn a complex production process using a simulation setting. The individual’s performance, as well as retentivity and prior knowledge is assessed. Our results show that higher retentivity goes along with better learning and forgetting performances. Prior knowledge did not reveal such relation to the learning and forgetting performances. The influence of age and gender is discussed in detail

Human Behavior in the Context of Continuous Change - An Exploratory Analysis in a Research and Application Center Industry 4.0

The modern world of work is characterized by discontinuity and innovation. Organizations must adapt to continuous change, which makes it crucial to manage organizational knowledge. Learning and forgetting processes are necessary to react successfully to the changes. On the individual level, this means that individuals have to adapt their behavior, which is often well-learned and routinized. This study aims to take a first step toward a more detailed understanding of human behavior in the context of continuous change. For this purpose, an exploratory analysis was conducted on data collected in a Research and Application Center Industry 4.0. The participants had to deal with the continuous change of routine actions in a simulated production environment, which enabled us to measure their adaptation errors. The occurrence of adaptation errors, their dependency on the type of change, and the behavioral patterns are discussed in detail. Implications for further research are derived

Recent findings on organizational unlearning and intentional forgetting research (2019–2022)

This mini review aims at summarizing the current state-of-the-art of empirical unlearning and intentional forgetting (U/IF) research at the individual, team, and organizational level. It adds to an earlier review and incorporates 31 recent studies from 2019 to 2022. The review reveals that predictors based on the organization’s adaptation context (e.g., competitive intensity), organization level (e.g., leadership exploration activities), individual task-related (e.g., features of the routines changed), and person-related level (e.g., cognitive control strategies) variables relate to process variables, such as the type of U/IF, the U/IF content (e.g., success beliefs or failure beliefs), and information processing variables (e.g., team information processing). The outcome variables are at the organizational level (e.g., cross-boundary innovation), team level performance level, the individual task performance level (e.g., errors), and person-related level (e.g., self-esteem). The analyzed studies at the team and organizational levels preferred cross-sectional study designs or in-depth qualitative methods, which severely limits the possibility of making causal statements. In contrast, at the individual-level studies use longitudinal designs as well to make temporal aspects of U/IF visible. But these individual level results are limited in terms of their generalizability to other levels. Even though all studies make valuable contribution to the understanding of antecedents and outcomes of U/IF, the temporal and process-related aspects of how U/IF unfolds at the different levels and subsequent options for its deliberate facilitation remain empirically little elaborated. It is proposed that in addition to studying the antecedents and consequences of U/IF in cross sectional designs, the topic needs more longitudinal designs to capture the nature of the U/IF processes in organizations