Learning from environmental feedback is crucial for organizational adaptation. However, many environments do not lend themselves to clear, immediate, and consequentially easy-to-learn feedback. Feedback from complex environments may be ambiguous, deriving from multiple or unreliable sources. This feedback may not only be difficult to learn from, but may also lead to conflicting incentives and opportune chances for politicking. In this symposium, we investigate the origins and consequences of learning from feedback in complex environments. The symposium presents articles and discussions from leading scholars that addresses four challenges in the organizational learning from feedback domain: (1) ambiguous feedback, (2) attribution biases, (3) incentive and motivational difficulties, and (4) unresolved internal conflicts within the firm. Thus, the symposium makes contributions to the understanding of organizational learning from feedback and managerial interpretation of information from multiple and unreliable sources.

With permission of the Academy of Management