This study uses an organizational learning perspective to examine how hotel experience (both accumulated from own and others) affects performance outcomes as evaluated by customer dissatisfaction. To this end, we show that hotel experience has a curvilinear effect on customer dissatisfaction, but the relationship has different shapes based on the source of learning (own vs. others). The learning outcome is also contingent on how a hotel aspires for performance improvement. We discuss the implications of these findings and highlight the fact that although learning from others can be more beneficial in the short term, hotels need to rely on their own experience as a source of learning for long-term benefits.

Introduction

Research on organizational learning acknowledges the importance of learning from own experience as well as the experience of others (i.e. competitors). The relationship between accumulated experience and performance (e.g. Wright, 1936; Levy, 1965; Adler and Clark, 1991), is contingent upon the source of learning (own vs. others) and the type of learning outcome being measured (March, 2010). Scholars have emphasized that learning through accumulation of own experience depends on several dimensions such as exposure to different types of experience (Haunschild and Sullivan, 2002) and the recency of the experience (Argote and Epple, 1990). Learning from the experience of others depends on the clarity and relatedness (i.e. to our own) of the competitor activities (Ingram and Baum, 1997), among other things. What affects learning outcomes also depend on the firm’s organizational structure (Bunderson and Boumgarden, 2010; Fang et al., 2010), social affiliations and networks (Reagans and McEvily, 2003), as well as other external factors surrounding the firm such as changes in government regulations or technological shifts (Bower and Christensen, 1996). When assessing whether firms learn through experience, one would also need to consider the type of performance outcome being measured. Traditionally, learning was measured through improvements in internal performance criteria such as revenue (Mezias et al., 2002), market share growth (Greve, 2008), and return on assets (Greve, 2003). However, the “new institutionalisms perspective” may highlight the importance of seeing learning outcomes through the lens of external stakeholders (DiMaggio and Powell, 1991), in particular, feedback on customer dissatisfaction (Lapré and Tsikriktsis, 2006). Customer-driven evaluations may encourage organizations to learn and improve in order to stay competitive in markets heavily influenced by such mechanisms. Despite the notable importance of external evaluations (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Smith, 2011), research assessing learning outcomes based on these external measures is scarce (Lapré and Tsikriktsis, 2006; Lapré, ۲۰۱۱).