Interactions between the context of a health-care organisation and failure: the situational impact of failure on organisational learning

Abstract

Purpose: This study aims to explore how health-care organisations learn from failures, challenging the common view in management science that learning is a continuous cycle. It focuses on understanding how the context of a health-care organisation and the characteristics of failure interact.

Design/methodology/approach: Systematically collected empirical studies that examine how health-care organisations react to failures, both in terms of learning and non-learning, were reviewed and analysed. The key characteristics of failures and contextual factors are categorised at the individual, team, organisational and global level.

Findings: Several factors across four distinct levels are identified as being susceptible to the situational impact of failure. In addition, these factors can be used in the design and development of innovations. Taking these factors into account is expected to stimulate learning responses when an innovation does not succeed. This enhances the understanding of how health-care organisations learn from failure, showing that learning behaviour is not solely dependent on whether a health-care organisation possesses the traits of a learning organisation or not.

Originality/value: This review offers a new perspective on organisational learning, emphasising the situational impact of failure and how learning occurs across different levels. It distinguishes between good and bad failures and their effects on a health-care organisation's ability to learn. Future research could use these findings to study how failures influence organisational performance over time, using longitudinal data to track changes in learning capacity.

Keywords: Failure; Innovation; Organisational learning.