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Empirical attempts to recommend enabling mechanisms for organizational unlearning are sparse and have almost neglected the vital role of leadership in transforming organizations through unlearning. Based on the tenets of persistence theories like path-dependence and imprinting theory, this study examines the relationship between transformational leadership and unlearning with the mediating role of knowledge sharing, transparent internal communication and intrapreneurship.

To analyze the hypothesized relationship between these constructs, data were collected from 452 faculty members working in Centrally Funded Technical Institutions (CFTIs) in India. The data were analyzed using Process macro (Hayes, 2022).

The results show a significant effect of transformational leadership on organizational unlearning. This effect is mediated by transparent internal communication and intrapreneurship. However, knowledge sharing did not mediate the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational unlearning.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, Covid-19, the rise of generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and policy reforms have pushed higher educational institutions to transform by unlearning old practices and experimenting with new ones. This paper informs how educational institutions can initiate and sustain the unlearning process.

Persistence theories like path-dependence and imprinting theory suggest that organizations often stick with proven success formulas and find it challenging to adopt new practices. Moreover, path dependence theorists advocate the role of an external intervening mechanism to break away from rigid and inefficient routines (or paths). This paper argues that in addition to external events (e.g. crisis, etc.), transformational leaders combined with organizational processes also help in unlearning obsolete knowledge and routines.

This study aims to qualitatively investigate when and how individuals' paradox mindset influences their individual unlearning.

This study adopted Charmaz's constructivist grounded theory approach based on constructivist ontology and interpretive epistemology. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 16 employees of a research company. The employees were asked about their perceptions of their roles and other factors that stimulated them to unlearn in a tension-setting environment.

This study developed a process model of paradox mindset for enhancing individual unlearning through three relational mechanisms, namely, enabling motivation to unlearn, understanding to unlearn and engaging in the unlearning process. The unlearning process is found to be influenced by paradoxical frames and emotions. Moreover, external factors, such as organizational changes, stimulate the adoption of paradoxical cognition and emotions while resource availability facilitates the unlearning process.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is the first to qualitatively investigate how a paradox mindset facilitates the process of unlearning through relational mechanisms. This model provides a holistic understanding of the cognitive, emotional and motivational processes involved in accepting the tensions of unlearning and promoting the unlearning process. The findings also have implications for research on paradox theory and the management of unlearning tensions at the micro level.

Although individual exploration activities have been shown to promote organizational change and innovation, few studies have clarified the factors that quantitatively promote such aspects. This study aims to examine how individual exploration activities are facilitated by goal orientation and individual unlearning.

The data are analyzed from 1,474 employees in various jobs in a variety of organizations in Japan. This study uses structural equation modeling to test the research model.

The results of this study indicate three findings. First, unlearning is effective in promoting individual exploration activities. Second, goal orientation has not only a direct effect on individual exploration activities but also a significant indirect effect on such activities through unlearning. Third, performance goal orientation has an inhibitory effect on individual exploration activities.

Managers should encourage team members’ exploration activities by setting learning goals for members and providing opportunities for members to unlearn the outdated knowledge or skills they are familiar with and learn new ones.

These findings contribute to the existing literature by demonstrating that learning goal orientation and unlearning play important roles in promoting individual exploration activities.

The purpose of this two-part paper is to develop a process model of unlearning established organizational routines. The model traces the interactions among three unlearning sub-processes: ostensive aspects of initial destabilization of an established routine; performative aspects of ongoing discarding-from-use of old behaviors and experimenting with new ones; and ostensive aspects of eventual release of prior understandings and development of new ones.

The paper draws on evidence from psychology and cognitive science to explain the mechanisms underlying organizational processes of unlearning embedded routines.

The proposed model contributes to enriching current understanding of unlearning organizational routines without contradicting it. Consistent with prior understanding, destabilizing an old routine may lead to discarding it, and further discarding-from-use is likely required for continued destabilization of embedded routines. Again, consistent with prior understanding, experimenting with new behaviors may be a desired outcome of unlearning an old routine, and ongoing experimentation is likely required to sustain unlearning embedded routines.

The organizational unlearning literature provides many examples of organizational members relinquishing old routines to then make new learning possible and also provides little insight into the processes by which this occurs. The paper addresses this gap by modeling the mutually reinforcing nature of three unlearning sub-processes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the level of consideration given to unlearning during human resource development interventions and to identify the methods being used to reinforce training and development.

A self‐administered questionnaire was given to a convenience sample of employers in regional Queensland and the Northern Territory, Australia. Analysis of responses using descriptive statistics was conducted to identify whether approaches differed in relation to unlearning and reinforcement between large and small organisations, and between those with high labour turnover and those with low labour turnover.

Results reveal that larger organisations give far more consideration to unlearning than smaller organisations. Those organisations with high labour turnover focus less on unlearning that those with a more stable workforce. Coaching and performance feedback were reported as the most commonly used method of reinforcement of learning and unlearning.

Low response rates mean that results are not statistically generalisable. Owing to the regional location of respondents there may be differences in findings in large metropolitan centres.

Reinforces to practitioners the need to consider unlearning, and also indicates a need for further research in this area. From a managerial perspective the results show that managers need to employ a range of tools and techniques to ensure unlearning can occur.

This paper reports on a study examining unlearning; and begins to address the lack of empirical research on this important concept.

Insight has grown that for an organization to learn and change successfully, forgetting and unlearning are required. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the relevant existing body of empirical research on forgetting and unlearning, to encourage research using a greater variety of methods and to contribute to a more complementary body of empirical work by using designs and instruments with a stronger reference to previous studies.

As the number of theoretical papers clearly exceeds the number of empirical papers, the present paper deals with the main insights based on the empirical state of research on unlearning and forgetting. So far, these empirical results have shown relationships between unlearning and other organizational outcomes such as innovation on an organizational level, but many of the other proposed relationships have not been investigated. The authors presents suggestion to apply a larger variety of qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods in organizational research.

Unlearning and forgetting research can benefit both from more diverse theoretical questions addressed in research and from a more complementary body of empirical work that applies methods, designs and instruments that refer to previous research designs and results. To understand and manage unlearning and forgetting, empirical work should relate to and expand upon previous empirical work to form a more coherent understanding of empirical results.

The paper presents a variety of research designs and methods that can be applied within the research context of understanding the nature of organizational forgetting and unlearning. Additionally, it illustrates the potential for different methods, such as experience sampling methods, which capture the temporal aspects of forgetting and unlearning.

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.

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.

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.

Few, if any, studies of the shared organisational context have considered the relationship between unlearning and the creation of intellectual capital.

Previous studies, particularly in knowledge management, have focussed on knowledge management systems in large world‐class organisations rather than the underlying learning process in SMEs.

This study examines three key constituents of the shared organisational context (the individual context, management and teamwork) and their effects on the process of unlearning.

Information, whether it is acquired from an external source or generated internally, is subjected to perceptual filters made up of the organization’s norms, procedures, and beliefs that influence what information the organization attends to and ultimately accepts. This paper examines the role which these organizational filters play in unlearning; viewed here as a specialized form of organizational learning. Unlearning is defined as the “process by which firms eliminate old logics and make room for new ones” by Prahalad and Bettis. The author argues that firms which engage in unlearning activities are better able to cast aside established routines in order to replace them with ones that ultimately result in superior value to their customers.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically validate the positive effect of learning on organizational resilience and, within this relationship, understand the role of unlearning in the COVID-19 crisis context and progress the current knowledge about these concepts.

This paper uses online survey data from German and Austrian organizations’ employees to test hypotheses derived from frameworks by Duchek (2019), Stephenson (2010) and Fiol and O’Connor (2017). The used questionnaire is built out of three pre-tested questionnaires to increase reliability. Conceptually, this paper takes a capability approach and a process perspective.

The results support the positive effect of organizational learning on resilience, while rejecting the hypothesized moderating effect of unlearning on this relationship. Organizational learning showed to have a particularly strong positive effect on the adaptive capacity of resilience, compared to organizational resilience overall.

To build a learning capability for organizational resilience, managers should foster an open system culture in their organization, which aims to be generally open to learn and adapt to be able to withstand adversity. During an organizational crisis, managers have the chance to rebuild organizational structures for better information flow, e.g. implementing formal knowledge management structures.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to empirically test the causal connection between organizational learning and resilience in the Central European context during the COVID-19 crisis. The inclusion of unlearning enriches the discourse about its conceptualizations and fosters future research.