RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE AND KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT (CASE STUDY: TEHRAN .I MUNICIPALITY)

In information era, knowledge is becoming a crucial organizational resource that provides competitive advantage and giving rise to knowledge management initiatives. Many organizations have collected and stored large amount of data. However, they are unable to discover valuable information hidden in the data by transforming these data into valuable and useful knowledge. Managing knowledge resources can be a challenge. Applying knowledge management needs special organizational structure so that different aspects of it can be freely available for employee. Threekey components of organizational structures are formalization, centralization, and complexity that their relationship with knowledge managementwill be evaluated in this study. Participants were 123 managers engaged in Tehran municipality, chosen by random, who were asked to fill a modified standard questionary of knowledge management and organizational structure. Data were evaluated by SPSS21 and hypotheses wereassessed by Pearson’s correlation coefficient. This study shows that as a result of high formalization and centralization, knowledge management index isn’t so efficient. Also there is a significant relationship between variables of organizational structure and knowledge management. In the way that there is a significant negative Pearson’s correlation coefficient between centralization and formality with knowledge management (-0.548and -0.343 respectively). Result revealed that centralized and formalized organizational structures have some inconveniences; decrease flexibility and availability of knowledge through processes that standardize knowledge and information and remove context.

Keywords:

Knowledge management , Organizational structure , Centralization , Formality , Complexity