Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Knowledge ...

Inocencia Mª Martínez-León and Isabel Olmedo-Cifuentes
justifies that <strong>the</strong> worker needs to acquire internal and external information, to understand better what
criteria are used by o<strong>the</strong>rs to manage his/her job successfully and interpret his/her contribution.
In <strong>the</strong> current study, low decentralization develops a combined influence with information acquisition
and distribution on organizational memory. A possible explanation for this might be that <strong>the</strong> decisionmaking
process requires information and knowledge, which should be captured, organized, indexed
and retrieved for future uses. Contrary to expectations, shared interpretation and high horizontal
specialization jointly influence on organizational memory. The reason is that <strong>the</strong> standardization <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong>
job requires knowing exactly <strong>the</strong> different procedures and knowledge, which facilitate <strong>the</strong>
development <strong>of</strong> organizational memory.
Ano<strong>the</strong>r unexpected fact is that this study did not find any significant influence <strong>of</strong> indoctrination on
OLP. Finally, <strong>the</strong>se findings have important implications for developing OLP. The present results are
significant in two ways: (a) organizational structure influences on <strong>the</strong> development <strong>of</strong> each OLA, and
b) <strong>the</strong> design parameters have different behaviour when <strong>the</strong>y influence jointly with OLPh on OLA. The
results do not determine what type <strong>of</strong> organizational structure (mechanistic or organic structure)
provides appropriate conditions for <strong>the</strong> development <strong>of</strong> OL. However, more research on this topic
needs to be undertaken before <strong>the</strong> association between OLPh, organizational structure (independent
variables) and OLA. Fur<strong>the</strong>r research should be also done to confirm <strong>the</strong> type <strong>of</strong> organizational
structure that facilitates OL.
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