Memoria organizacional e reutilização do conhecimento técnico : estudo de caso em uma indústria multinacional eletroeletrônica no Brasil

Abstract

Over time, the experience of an organization, accumulated through its people, culture, processes and documents, collectively constitutes its organizational memory. However, the pressure for innovation, dictated by the world economy, leads organizations to believe that past experience hinders improvement, rather than providing the lessons learned to achieve higher levels of excellence. Management that neglects institutionalization of past experience is subject to involuntary and continuous reinvention of the wheel, as opposed to focusing on continuous improvement. This case study research aimed to investigate the existence of practices that foster and promote explicit technological organizational memory, i.e., documented knowledge, as well as those practices related to the reuse of this knowledge for problem solving. The company investigated was a multinational company from the electroelectronic segment. Several sites were included in the study. For each site, employees belonging to the company's technical departments were surveyed by means of a Likert-scale questionnaire for the quantitative analysis. The survey also included a free-text field to enable a qualitative analysis. The methodology attempted to identify the difference between two groups: those employees who work most of their time in the case-company premises (named internal group), and those who work most of their time at the customer's premises (external group). A total of 936 people were surveyed, out of which 408 responded (i.e., 43%, a nonprobabilistic sample). The overall results indicated that although the employees recognize the importance to grow the explicit technological organizational memory, and valorize the memory processes, such processes do not occur in an effective way in the company. Furthermore, though the company showed some incentive towards developing organizational memory processes, such incentive was not clearly perceived by all employees. Additionally it was observed that the processes most valued by the company were the ones most practiced by the employees. Within the internal and external groups the results were similar, with the major difference being that certain factors that were justified in one group were not justified in the other group.