Organizational Unlearning Dynamics Emerging During Digital Transformation: Implications for Organizational Change

In this paper, we investigate the arising of organizational unlearning dynamics during transformations enabled by digital technologies, and their implications for organizational change effectiveness. First, we carry out a desk analysis to explore the radical changes enabled by digital technologies that impact organizations multidimensionally. Afterwards, we investigate how this scenario creates the need for organizational unlearning dynamics, to overcome the interplay between path dependencies and organizational deep structure. Thus, we analyse four cases from the literature, with the aim of highlighting the impacts of digital advance over organizational culture, structure, strategy, control systems, and power distribution arrangements. This study brings the following main findings. First, changes related to digital transformation impact organizational deep structure. Second, organizational unlearning dynamics arose from these changes, creating the need to overcome path dependency mechanisms that could inhibit the organization from embracing innovative arrangements. Altogether, this study contributes to making awareness of the critical role played by organizational unlearning practices within organizational change related to advances in the deployment of digital technologies, also suggesting a first set of insights relevant from both the theoretical and managerial perspective.