Rethinking Organizational Learning Culture: Why One Shared Culture May Be a Myth

For decades, managers and researchers alike have treated organizational learning culture as a kind of corporate holy grail: a unified set of values, norms, and practices that everyone in a company supposedly shares, driving continuous learning and innovation. But a new study published in Frontiers in Organizational Psychology argues that this comfortable assumption may be fundamentally wrong. Drawing on a systematic scoping review of 210 publications and an in-depth case study of a German bank, researchers Timo Kortsch, Anja Pia Schmitz, and Rabea Germanus show that the field of organizational learning culture has been operating under a strikingly narrow lens—one that ignores subcultural differences and ambiguity within organizations.

The researchers built their argument on a framework first proposed by organizational culture scholar Joanne Martin in 1992. Martin identified three distinct perspectives through which organizational culture can be understood: integration, differentiation, and fragmentation. The integration perspective views culture as a coherent system of shared values and assumptions that binds members together. The differentiation perspective, by contrast, sees organizations as constellations of subcultures—departments, teams, or professional groups—that may hold distinct, internally consistent views while differing from one another. The fragmentation perspective goes further, emphasizing that cultural meanings can be ambiguous, fluid, and situation-dependent, never fully consolidating into stable consensus at any level.

When Kortsch and colleagues applied this three-perspective lens to the existing literature on organizational learning culture, the results were striking. Of the 210 publications analyzed in their systematic scoping review, a staggering 208 were classified as primarily integration-compatible—treating learning culture as an organization-wide, internally coherent property. Only two publications explicitly addressed subcultural differentiation, and not a single one adopted fragmentation as its primary cultural perspective. This means that decades of research have largely assumed that everyone in an organization shares the same understanding of what learning means, why it matters, and how it should be enacted.

The scoping review also revealed significant conceptual confusion in the field. Many studies either omitted a clear definition of organizational learning culture or introduced idiosyncratic ones, frequently conflating it with related constructs such as the learning organization or organizational learning itself. The researchers distinguish these three concepts carefully: organizational learning refers to the processes through which information and experience are acquired, interpreted, and translated into changes in knowledge or practice. The learning organization describes a normative ideal—an organization in which learning processes are deliberately facilitated and systematically embedded. Organizational learning culture, by contrast, is the cultural context of learning: the system of assumptions, values, norms, and artifacts that shapes how learning is interpreted and enacted.

To illustrate how the three perspectives can be applied in practice, the researchers conducted a mixed-methods case study in a medium-sized German bank with around 700 employees. They combined a standardized employee survey using the German version of the Dimensions of the Learning Organization Questionnaire—completed by 436 employees with a 63 percent response rate—with 19 semi-structured interviews across different departments and hierarchical levels. The quantitative data allowed them to assess organization-wide agreement and cluster-level differences, while the qualitative interviews revealed the nuanced, sometimes contradictory meanings employees attach to learning.

The quantitative findings showed substantial organization-wide agreement in how employees rated their learning culture, consistent with the integration perspective. Agreement indices for the seven dimensions of the learning organization questionnaire ranged from 0.78 to 0.84, suggesting that employees across the bank shared a broadly similar frame of reference. However, the researchers also found modest but systematic differences between organizational clusters. Intraclass correlations indicated that approximately 3 to 8 percent of the variance in learning-culture perceptions was associated with cluster membership. The Talent Development and Early Careers cluster scored significantly higher than several other departments, while Corporate Services and Support Functions scored lowest—a pattern that held across multiple analytical approaches.

The qualitative interviews painted an even richer picture. Across all hierarchical levels, employees consistently framed learning as an individual responsibility—a shared organizational norm that board members explicitly reinforced using the German concept of Holschuld, or the duty to actively seek out information. Yet how this norm was enacted varied dramatically across departments. Some units enjoyed strong leadership support, protected time for reflection, and generous training budgets. Others faced resource constraints, competing priorities, and managers who did not prioritize development. As one operational employee put it, the learning culture was not uniform but very different across areas of the organization.

Perhaps most revealingly, the interviews uncovered fragmentation-compatible patterns that the quantitative data alone could not detect. Employees described navigating ambiguity, information overload, and conflicting signals about learning expectations. Some developed highly personalized coping strategies—screenshotting information and emailing it to themselves, listening to podcasts during commutes, or pursuing degrees on their own time and at their own expense. Learning was often displaced to evenings or squeezed between tasks, reflecting a gap between the organization’s stated commitment to development and the daily realities employees faced. These findings suggest that fragmentation is not merely a theoretical curiosity but a lived experience that shapes how learning actually happens.

Based on these findings, the researchers propose a clarified and extended definition of organizational learning culture that explicitly encompasses all three cultural perspectives. They define it as the system of assumptions, values, norms, and artifacts that shape how learning is interpreted, enacted, and supported within an organization—recognizing that these cultural meanings may be shared across the organization, consolidated within subgroups, or remain ambiguous, situational, and contested. This definition moves beyond the assumption of cultural unity that has characterized much of the field and provides a more nuanced foundation for future theorizing and measurement.

For practitioners, the implications are significant. The three-perspective approach offers a diagnostic tool that can reveal multiple realities of learning within a single organization—what appears as a supportive learning culture from an executive viewpoint may be experienced quite differently at the employee level. Managers who rely solely on aggregated survey scores risk overlooking subcultural variation and ambiguity that may undermine their learning initiatives. By examining coherence, subgroup differences, and ambiguity simultaneously, organizations can develop more targeted and effective interventions, transfer effective practices across units, and address the specific needs of less visible employee groups. The study ultimately challenges the field to embrace the full complexity of organizational learning culture rather than reducing it to a single, unified narrative.

Subject of Research: Organizational learning culture examined through integration, differentiation, and fragmentation perspectives on organizational culture

Article Title: A three-perspective approach to organizational learning culture: a systematic scoping review, conceptual clarification and extension, and an initial empirical investigation

Article References: Kortsch, T., Schmitz, A. P., & Germanus, R. (2026). A three-perspective approach to organizational learning culture: a systematic scoping review, conceptual clarification and extension, and an initial empirical investigation. Frontiers in Organizational Psychology, 4, Article 1746548. https://doi.org/10.3389/forgp.2026.1746548

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/forgp.2026.1746548

Keywords: organizational learning culture, organizational culture, three-perspective approach, integration, differentiation, fragmentation, scoping review, mixed-methods case study, learning organization, workplace learning, subcultures, German bank