How do organizations remember? The influence of organizational structure on organizational memory
基于122名多部门企业员工的调查数据，研究了专业化和标准化这两个组织结构维度如何通过知识编码和电子沟通影响组织记忆，对管理者和组织研究者有参考价值。
How do organizational factors influence knowledge retention and storage within companies? In this study, we examine the influence of organizational structure on organizational memory. We are specifically interested in the effects of specialization and standardization—dimensions of the organizational structure—on organizational memory as conceptualized by Walsh and Ungson (1991) and Argote (2005). This study is based on recent survey data from 122 respondents of multi-unit organizations that are mainly from the consulting, financial, automotive, and electrical industries. The results suggest that structural organizational factors, i.e. specialization and standardization as well as organizational processes such as codification and personalization of information and electronic communication influence organizational memory. Furthermore, the results show that codification of information fully mediates the relationship between standardization and organizational memory and that electronic communication partially mediates the relationship between specialization and organizational memory. Overall, the results suggest that the processes of codification of knowledge as well as electronic communication are conducive to the formation of organizational memory and that respective organizational memory bins have unique associations with the organizational structure factors. Our study is one of the first to empirically test propositions with regard to the concept of organizational memory.