How Organizational Structure Affects Organizational Learning

Abstract

Nowadays, the knowledge has become a principal source of competitive advantage similar to other valuable resource and strategic assets in an organization. However, without proper management of such a valuable resource, utilization of knowledge becomes difficult and inefficient. From an organizational perspective, the most important aspect of knowledge management is to transfer knowledge. In this regards, organizations must adopt structures that allow them to create and transfer more knowledge. Organizational structure affects the nature of human interactions and knowledge flow which in its own turn can lead to a competitive advantage in the knowledge economy. In this article we emphasize the role of an organizational structure as a mechanism for knowledge flow and organizational learning. Hence we test organizational learning performance under different network structures which are mainly traditional hierarchical approach, hybrid structures and a fully connected network. Our experimental results indicate the fact that traditional hierarchical approach has the lowest performance in a learning organization while a fully connected network provides the best performance. The findings reflect the fact that organizations need a more flexible hybrid structure to allow mobility and lateral connection between the individuals, a structure which is between the two extremes, one of traditional hierarchy and the other of full connectivity pattern.