2.4.2 Individual unlearning, organi

2.4.2 Individual unlearning, organizational unlearning and resource flexibility. Obtaining and controlling scarce resources is an effective strategy for enterprises to cope with changing environments (Sanchez, 1995; Sanchez, 1997). Thus, it is crucial for firms to continually accumulate flexible resources or extend the exploitative scope of resources (Sanchez, 1995) by existing routines. However, in a new environment, they may be outdated and produce path dependency and inertia (Ketokivi and Schroeder, 2004). Unlearning can promote resource flexibility by changing outdated routines. At an individual level, if conditions are stable, individuals become automatic in their actions since the reliability and invariance of routines increase (Nelson and Winter, 1982). However, individual routines may constrain their behaviors (Conley and Enomoto, 2005) when their environment changes. To be specific, outdated routines not only inhibit them to search, evaluate and acquire external resources, but also reduce their perceptions of the value of those resources. As a result, individuals may ignore new important and valuable resources (Mezias et al., 2001). Therefore, Nonaka and Konno (1998) state that the process of eliminating routines needs individual initiative. Individual unlearning is a deliberate behavior of changing inappropriate routines. Through individual unlearning, firms can obtain more external resources that provide the elements for dealing with a changing environment. At an organizational level, firms develop routines to effectively extend the scope of resources or reduce the cost and time of switching from one usage of resources to another. In changing environments, there is a greater need for adjusting routines than in stable environments since routines cannot evolve to new environment by themselves (Nelson and Winter, 1982). Therefore, in the new situations, existing routines may become suboptimal, but continue out of habit (Cohen and Bacdayan, 1994). To make matters worse, these routines prevent firms from identifying the usage of new resources and the new uses for existing resources, eventually resulting in resource inflexibility. Organizational unlearning enables firms to update existing routines, thereby improving resource flexibility. Based on the above analysis, we hypothesize that: H2a. Individual unlearning positively affects resource flexibility. H2b. Organizational unlearning positively affects resource flexibility.