Halmstad University School of Business and Engineering Master Programme in Management of Innovation and Business Development ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY SYSTEMS AS A SOURCE OF LEARNING FOR NEW EMPLOYEES IN AN INNOVATION CONTEXT Dissertation in Management of Innovation and Business Development, 15 ECTS Author Liudmila Zadayannaya (840521) Supervisors Christer Norr, Jonas Rundquist Examiner Mike Danilovic Spring 2012 Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincere gratitude to members of the case company for time and efforts they devoted to this research. Also, I would like to thank my supervisors and opponents for valuable comments, ideas and overall support. Liudmila Zadayannaya, May 21st, 201 i Abstract Organizational memory is said to be one of the essential factors of organizational learning, particularly in a part that is concerned with knowledge flowing from an organization to its employees. Often viewed as a system of knowledge repositories, organizational memory is argued to be important in various contexts. The purpose of this study is to explore an impact of the organizational memory in two such contexts, namely in a situation of presence of new employees and organization involved in innovation activity. The importance of organizational memory for the new employees can be explained by the fact that it is through facing it they socialize in the organization. Organizational memory also influences innovative behaviour of employees. This researched is performed in a form of a case study; where the object of study finds itself in a combined context – new employees of R&D department learn from different organizational memory systems. The data for this case study were collected through qualitative interviewing of both the newcomers and their supervisor. The results show that new employees face a range of memory systems, and this range does not depend on the innovativeness of the work they are involved in. It was found possible to look separately into the systems and methods the newcomers accessed them. The most important access methods in this case turned out to be personal communication and IT-enabled means, however a number of other methods were also found relevant for the case. Focusing on how this knowledge can support innovative behaviour of the new employees, this study has found several ways in which both incremental and radical innovations can be enhanced. The memory systems have been found to affect innovative behaviour of the newcomers by demonstrating expectance of this behaviour, by providing “old” knowledge, as well as hints where one can possibly find “old” and “new” knowledge. In general, the findings suggest that looking into memory systems separately from the ways to access them might give valuable insights for rethinking how properties of the memory systems have been defined so far. Keywords: organizational memory, knowledge repositories, new employees, innovation, case study ii Table of contents 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................................................................. 1 1.1 Problem background ........................................................................................................................................................ 1 1.2 Problem discussion ........................................................................................................................................................... 2 1.3 Purpose and Research questions ................................................................................................................................ 2 2. Theoretical framework ........................................................................................................................................................... 3 2.1 Organizational memory .................................................................................................................................................. 3 2.2 New employees and organizational memory ......................................................................................................... 8 2.3 Propensity to innovation and organizational memory ...................................................................................... 8 2.4 Summary ............................................................................................................................................................................ 10 3. Method ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 10 3.1 Research purpose, approach and strategy ........................................................................................................... 10 3.2 Choice of the case ............................................................................................................................................................ 10 3.3 Data collection method ................................................................................................................................................. 11 3.4 Interview guides.............................................................................................................................................................. 11 4. Empirical findings .................................................................................................................................................................. 12 4.1 Case context ...................................................................................................................................................................... 12 4.2 Memory systems ............................................................................................................................................................. 14 4.3 Summary ............................................................................................................................................................................ 17 5. Discussion .................................................................................................................................................................................. 17 5.1 How new employees access the company’s memory systems .................................................................... 17 5.2 How knowledge obtained from the organizational memory systems can support innovative behaviour of the new employees ..................................................................................................................................... 20 6. Conclusion and limitations ................................................................................................................................................. 23 7. Suggestions for future research ....................................................................................................................................... 24 8. Managerial implications ...................................................................................................................................................... 24 References ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 26 Appendices .................................................................................................................................................................................... 29 Appendix 1 ................................................................................................................................................................................ 29 Appendix 2 ................................................................................................................................................................................ 29 Appendix 3 ................................................................................................................................................................................ 30 Appendix 4 ................................................................................................................................................................................ 30 Appendix 5 ................................................................................................................................................................................ 30 List of tables Table 1: Memory systems in organizations......................................................................................................................... 4 Table 2: Summary of the topics discussed at the interviews .................................................................................... 11 Table 3: Knowledge obtained by the new employees through the organization’s memory systems ...... 17 Table 4: Knowledge directly related to innovation the new employees obtain from the memory systems ............................................................................................................................................................................................ 20 iii 1. Introduction 1.1 Problem background Both academic and managerial literature widely recognizes organizational learning as an important pre-requisite of organization’s survival and successful performance, especially in environment that is complex