Regeländerungsprozesse und organisatorisches Lernen: Zum Übergang individueller Erfahrungen in eine organisationale Wissensbasis

Processes of rule change and organizational Learning Standard operating procedures (SOPs) are part of the decision environment that organizations constitute for their members: they limit the aspect of reality which is relevant for certain decision problems. At the same time, SOPs might be regarded as an accumulation of organizational experience. Thus, processes of rule change could be thought of as indicators for organizational learning. We report findings from a qualitative study of rule change in a German bank. These findings suggest that decisions about changes of SOPs are guided by the limited yet specialized experiential knowledge of the involved organization members. Due to the interconnectedness of work processes, an appropriate combination of several of these limited experience bases seems to be necessary to handle the boundedness of single actors.