Unlearning in a banking organization: an analysis at the individual level

Abstract This study aims to understand how unlearning occurs at the individual level in a banking organization. We describe the work environment, identifying the spaces and times for creating situational awareness and the limits to temporal freedom; investigate how errors and accumulated knowledge are processed in organizational daily life; understand how constant changes affect the unlearning process; identify the existence of elements of the unlearning process in the management practices of workers in leadership positions and describe them. This research is exploratory and descriptive, with a qualitative approach, being a single case study. The data collection techniques used were semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and document analysis, enabling data triangulation, which were analyzed using content analysis. The results reveal that unlearning at the individual level occurs fortuitously due to obstacles that make the process difficult and lack the means and actions that intensify daily practices for unlearning in the organizational environment. By applying the proposed analytical conceptual scheme, it was found that the occurrence of unlearning requires intentional intervention - workers need to be able to unlearn.