KNOWLEDGE SHARING AND INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCE: THE MEDIATION ROLE OF ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY

Abstract

Current organizations face several fundamental challenges, foremost of which is the desire to survive and continue, especially with the turmoil in the environment resulting from the intensity of economic changes, as well as the inevitability of creativity, excellence, and competition in light of the so-called knowledge-based economy. Failure to seek to retain the organization’s competencies makes it unable to face these challenges, and thus it is forced to exit the markets, as the knowledge possessed by employees is considered intangible capital that requires attention to its management just as physical capital is managed, especially since knowledge is the only resource that gains its strategic characteristics by not recognizing the law of decrease with use, and does not suffer from the problem of scarcity. Rather, its participation, sharing it among employees, and its use are considered factors for success and represent protection for the organization from the risk of organizational forgetfulness. However, the changes that organizations are experiencing, especially in the field of their human resources, such as retirement, layoffs, or voluntary departure, have caused them to lose a huge amount of cumulative knowledge, and thus the gradual loss of their organizational memory. There are many examples of organizations that declared deterioration in their performance as a result of their failure to maintain their accumulated experience and skills, due to the loss of their most important employees, therefore, these organizations can be considered a model of organizational memory loss, or what is called organizational forgetting. Knowledge sharing is considered the best way for employees to generate solutions, develop competencies, and gain a competitive advantage for the organization because it has a direct impact on employee productivity. Since sharing knowledge among employees always results in the generation of creative ideas that help develop organizational capabilities, and discover new and advanced solutions that help face daily challenges and new situations, the primary goal of knowledge sharing is to coordinate, organize, and unify efforts to achieve the individual, strategic, and operational goals of the organization, because it is considered a knowledge management practice that emphasizes that the organization is obligated to exploit its knowledge available in the organizational knowledge repository, which is called organizational memory, and through which the organization can enable its workers to have easy and convenient access to the useful and valuable knowledge that has been stored, in other words, organizational memory is that knowledge that can be used in current business activities, that is, retrieving, sharing, applying and benefiting from previous lessons and experiences within a collective system, to form a structure and meaning for events, which allows for the immediate interpretation of information that helps in decision-making, or carry out operational activities to the fullest extent. Therefore, achieving the building of a strong organizational memory requires systematic processes, the most important of which is the serious sharing of knowledge, which is what our study dealt with in analysis, clarification, and interpretation, as its goal was to investigate the nature of the relationship between sharing knowledge and building a good organizational memory, and the resulting improvement in individual and group performance, through our projection of this perception into reality by studying the impact of knowledge sharing on organizational memory, and through it on the individual performance of employees of Algerian organizations. To achieve this goal, we conducted a field study of a group of Algerian organizations by distributing a questionnaire that studies the relationship between the three variables (knowledge sharing, organizational memory, and individual performance of employees of these organizations). Theoretically, this study concluded that building and sustaining organizational memory requires providing basic infrastructure from information technology to in-depth knowledge of knowledge management processes and systems, in addition to highlighting the attempts, obstacles, and challenges that may face the process of building an active and developed organizational memory. It also pointed to the interactive, reciprocal relationship between human resources and the organization’s memory, as individuals possess and store tacit knowledge and are the only ones capable of encoding, sharing, circulating, and transmitting it to their colleagues. Therefore, they have a major role in building the organization’s memory, and they also benefit from this memory at the same time because it allows them to access the operational knowledge and knowledge they need to make their decisions and face their daily problems. In the field, this study concluded that there is a positive relationship between knowledge sharing and organizational memory in its three dimensions (functional knowledge, social knowledge, and industrial knowledge). In addition, organizational memory has a positive relationship with individual performance in both dimensions (task performance and contextual performance). The study also concluded that organizational memory plays a mediating role in the relationship between knowledge sharing and individual performance.