The relationship between nursing groups’ organizational socialization and nurses’ perception of organizational learning subprocesses: a cross-sectional study in hospital wards

Purpose This study aims to investigate the relationship between a nursing group’s organizational socialization (OS) and the organizational learning (OL) subprocesses of information acquisition, information distribution, information interpretation, information integration and organizational memory. Design/methodology/approach A cross-sectional study, with an anonymous self-report questionnaire, was conducted at two university hospitals in Japan. OL was measured using the scale for OL subprocesses, while OS was measured using the scale for learning about the external environment. The questionnaire was administered from August to October 2018. Among the 1,077 nurses recruited from 34 wards, data from 466 nurses from 24 wards were analyzed. To verify the influence of the group’s OS on each OL subprocess, two-level hierarchical linear modeling with fixed effects was performed. Individual nurses’ OS was analyzed using centering within clusters and the group’s OS was analyzed using each ward’s average OS score by performing grand mean centering. Findings Nursing groups’ OS was positively and significantly associated with information interpretation and information integration, but not with information acquisition, information distribution and organizational memory. Originality/value This study expands OS and OL research by focusing on the relationship between the degree of OS of an entire group and the OL subprocess. When the degree of homophily of value, rule, knowledge and behavior of the entire group increases, the information understanding and the formation of new explicit knowledge may also increase in the group.