On Organizational Learning

List of figures vii List of tables viii Acknowledgements ix Preface xiii Introduction: The Evolving Field of Organizational Learning 1 Part I Organizational Defenses 1 Making Sense of Limited Learning 19 2 Tacit Knowledge and Management 54 3 Why Individuals and Organizations have Difficulty in Double-loop Learning 67 4 Crafting a Theory of Practice: The Case of Organizational Paradoxes 92 5 Today’s Problems with Tomorrow’s Organizations 107 6 Teaching Smart People How to Learn 127 7 A Leadership Dilemma: Skilled Incompetence 139 Part II Inhibiting Organizational Learning and Effectiveness 8 Organizational Learning and Management Information Systems 151 9 Strategy Implementation: An Experiment in Learning 164 10 How Strategy Professionals Deal with Threat: Individual and Organizational 174 11 The Dilemma of Implementing Controls: The Case of Managerial Accounting 186 12 Human Problems with Budgets 196 13 Bridging Economics and Psychology: The Case of the Economic Theory of the Firm 214 Part III The Counterproductive Consequences of Organizational Development and Human Resource Activities 14 Good Communication that Blocks Learning 229 15 Reasoning, Action Strategies, and Defensive Routines: The Case of OD Practitioners 239 16 Inappropriate Defenses against the Monitoring of Organization Development Practice 267 17 Do Personal Growth Laboratories Represent an Alternative Culture? 281 Part IV The Inhibition of Valid and Usable Information from the Correct Use of Normal Science 18 Actionable Knowledge: Design Causality in the Service of Consequential Theory 297 19 Field Theory as a Basis for Scholarly Consulting 310 20 Unrecognized Defenses of Scholars: Impact on Theory and Research 323 21 Seeking Truth and Actionable Knowledge: How the Scientific Method Inhibits Both 335 22 Problems and New Directions for Industrial Psychology 343 23 The Incompleteness of Social-Psychological Theory: Examples from Small Group, Cognitive Consistency, and Attribution Research 375 24 Dangers in Applying Results from Experimental Social Psychology 395 25 Making Knowledge More Relevant to Practice: Maps for Action 415 26 Participatory Action Research and Action Science Compared 432 27 Some Unintended Consequences of Rigorous Research 440 Index 454