When Do Organizations Learn From Each Other ? Interorganizational Learning in Health Care

Interorganizational relationships (IORs, e.g. alliances) have become increasingly popular across industries – particularly in knowledge-intensive industries as organizations seek ways to learn and innovate at a faster pace. Health care organizations have been especially inclined to form IORs recently, with many joining quality improvement collaboratives, in which multidisciplinary teams from multiple institutions work together to improve practices around a specific topic (e.g. decreasing infection rates). This research capitalizes on the prevalence of collaboratives to study interorganizational learning in health care, a process that has received scant attention in both organizational learning theory and the health care management literature. The questions of when do organizations move beyond mere collaborative membership to become active learning partners, and what the outcomes of such a transition are remain under-theorized. This study addresses this knowledge gap by proposing and testing a model of antecedents and consequences of interorganizational learning activity (ILA). Survey data collected from 53 teams in four collaboratives suggests that organizational, collaborative and task characteristics all influence the use of ILA. In particular, organizational support, perceived organizational similarity and task simplicity are positively associated with ILA, which in turn increases organizations’ process improvement. The data also show that collaborative identification and team functioning play important mediating and moderating roles, respectively. The implications of these findings for theory and practice are discussed.