Linking shared organisational context and relational capital through unlearning: An initial empirical investigation in SMEs

Purpose – The environment provided by an organisation to facilitate learning and create knowledge has been defined as the shared organisational context. The value to an organisation of knowledge created by the shared organisational context is called intellectual capital, of which one key component is relational capital. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the aspect of learning concerned with challenging the basic beliefs or processes that companies take for granted, which is embodied in the concept of unlearning.Design/methodology/approach – This paper reviews the literature to identify relevant measures and present a structural equation model, which is validated through an empirical investigation of 139 small‐ to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Spanish optometry sector.Findings – The results indicate that companies need to support unlearning as a prior step, otherwise unlearning does not have any significant effect on the creation of relational capital.Research limitations/implications – Few...

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