Employee deviance from organizational procedures and its effect on learning
This study assesses factors leading employees to adhere to or deviate from organizational procedures, as well as the relation between deviations from procedures and learning. In drawing on literature about workplace deviance, organizational routines, and organizational learning, the study sheds light on the positive aspect of employee deviance from procedures. It tests a key finding of James March’s model about organizational learning, namely that organizational learning depends upon employee deviance from organizational procedures, in an experimental setting. In a laboratory experiment with 266 participants, the difficulty of a procedure, the incentives and accountability of the participants, and the appropriateness of the procedure, i.e. whether it leads to the intended results or not, are manipulated. The results suggest different ways for organizations to influence their employees’ adherence to and deviation from procedures, in order to achieve the desired amount of deviation. March’s finding that deviations lead to learning is found to depend on the appropriateness of the procedures: deviation from inappropriate procedures leads to learning, while deviation from appropriate ones does not.