Learning from failure: Cross-national analyses of airline accidents

There has been relative little attention to organizational learning from failures,
while a significant amount of literature on organizational misconducts and disasters
has addressed the market outcomes of the failures or efficiency problems. Majority
of the previous work on airline accidents, in particular, have been limited in that
the accidents were attributed to individual errors or a single firm’s incompetence.
Exploring the organizational learning from undesirable experiences, this paper
investigates how the lessons from aero-accidents are carried through different
learning routes. Diversified learning mechanisms are intra-, inter- and supra-national
levels of learning. The key arguments of this paper, which are limitations of
self-learning, effects of connectedness and globalized safety culture, are driven by
the following theoretical frameworks: organizational learning perspective, network
theory and neo-institutional approach. Using a sample of 822 accidents of the
non-US commercial airliners in the world from 1990 to 2002, this article argues
that learning from its own failures is limited since organizations, in certain situations,
are too inert to be effective self-learners. In contrast, network learning and exposure
to the international aero-safety norms significantly reduce the chance of further
accidents