Unpacking Prior Experience: How Career History Affects Job Performance
Organization Science
The Influence of Psychological Safety and Confidence in Knowledge on Employee Knowledge Sharing
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Firms as Incubators of Open-Source Software
Information Systems Research
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Information Systems Research
Organizational Learning: From Experience to Knowledge
Organization Science
A Hidden Markov Model of Developer Learning Dynamics in Open Source Software Projects
Information Systems Research
Journal of Engineering and Technology Management
The Division of Gains from Complementarities in Human-Capital-Intensive Activity
Organization Science
The Learning Curve of IT Knowledge Workers in a Computing Call Center
Information Systems Research
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Organizational Learning as Credit Assignment: A Model and Two Experiments
Organization Science
Journal of Management Information Systems
Selection at the Gate: Difficult Cases, Spillovers, and Organizational Learning
Organization Science
Single machine scheduling with autonomous learning and induced learning
Computers and Industrial Engineering
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Learning by doing represents an important mechanism through which organizations prosper. Some firms, however, learn from their experience at a dramatic rate, while other firms exhibit very little learning at all. Three factors have been identified that affect the rate at which firms learn: (a) the proficiency of individual workers, (b) the ability of firm members to leverage knowledge accumulated by others, and (c) the capacity for coordinated activity inside the organization. Each factor varies with a particular kind of experience. An increase in cumulative individual experience increases individual proficiency. An increase in cumulative organizational experience provides individuals with the opportunity to benefit from knowledge accumulated by others. An increase in cumulative experience working together promotes more effective coordination and teamwork. To gain insight into factors responsible for the learning curve, we examine the contribution of each kind of experience to performance, while controlling for the impact of the other two. The study context is a teaching hospital. The task is a total joint replacement procedure, and the performance metric is procedure completion time. We find that each kind of experience makes a distinct contribution to team performance. We discuss the implications of our findings for the learning-by-doing framework in general, and learning in the team context in particular.