Organizational memory: reducing source-sink distance

Sandelands and Stablein (1987) portrayed organizations as “mental entities capable of thought”. Argyris and Schon (1978) regard this construct as a metaphor-that organizations do not literally remember. However the storage component attributed to social groups is characterized, this collective “memory”, combined with supporting mnemonic functions for its appropriate applications, has been termed “organizational memory” (OM). Since collective memory is clearly a social construct, any OM system must support the human interactions necessary to best capture, retain and retrieve organizational information in a manner that it is most likely to increase future effectiveness. This paper explores impacting fields as human memory, communication and knowledge transfer, group and team processes, and organizational learning. Characteristics in these mechanisms create a perceptual “distance” between the end-user of the stored knowledge and the initial participant. This distance is logically compressed in the OM model and further described as a modification of Morrison´s (1993) “team memory” model, creating a descriptive construct representation of OM