Evaluation of Port Managers' Perception of Organizational Unlearning and its Influence on Organizational Performance

Abstract

Organizational unlearning is widely considered an essential condition for successful adaptation to environmental changes, as it promotes organizational learning and improves company performance, Tsang and Zahra (2008). With transformations in the external environment, experiences and often-valued beliefs become an obstacle to organizational adaptation, Becker (2018). According to Hedberg (1981), an organization's inability to unlearn becomes a weakness in the long run, since over time, much of the strategic knowledge acquired becomes obsolete. In this sense, organizational success depends on its ability to abandon knowledge, values, behaviours or routines which, although they were sources of competitive advantage in the past, are no longer so today. This process of giving up knowledge must start with people, because they are the ones who make organizational unlearning possible, since organizations unlearn through them, since they don't have mental activities. (Cegarra-Navarro; Wensley; Batistic; Evans et al., 2021) ). In this article we analyze port managers' perceptions of the unlearning practices implemented in their organizations and their influence on their organizational performance, since the sector faces challenges in terms of process modernization, competitiveness, safety and expansion. Based on a quantitative approach, we conducted surveys of Angolan port managers and used statistical methods to test two hypotheses related to unlearning practices and organizational culture. To test the research hypotheses, we used Cronbach's alpha to assess the internal reliability of the items in the three constructs, simple linear regression to analyze the relationship between the variables organizational unlearning, unlearning practices and organizational culture and Pearson's correlation to examine the relationships between the variables. The results show that both unlearning practices and organizational culture are positively related to organizational performance. We point to future studies that analyze the barriers to unlearning and the role of AI in this context.