Within the current business environment, knowledge management, organisational learning and unlearning mechanisms are becoming critical factors in the process of reaching lasting competitive advantages. Our research model employs the competing values framework (Cameron and Quinn, 1999) to empirically assess the influence of the firm's own cultural typology on organisational unlearning. Our hypotheses are tested using a sample of 145 firms drawn from the Spanish automotive components manufacturing sector. The relationships between the constructs are assessed through the use of partial least squares (PLS) path-modelling, a variance-based structural equation modelling technique. The outcomes reveal that certain types of culture exert a higher influence on unlearning than others. This suggests in turn that some cultural typologies are better positioned to face the current turbulent situation than others.