Organizational Memory Level And Strategic Change

With the growing competition, the external environment that enterprises are facing is increasingly complex and turbulence, and enterprises urgently need to carry on the corresponding strategic change. In the dynamic environment, in order to carry on effective strategic change to enhance the adaptability and flexibility of strategy, organizations must contain and use the existing experience, knowledge and skills, et al. In this context, western scholars pertinently put forward the concept of organizational memory. However, because of the existing hysteresis of the content of memory, such as experience, knowledge and skills organizations historically contained, organizations must promote efficient organizational improvisation in the double pressure of environmental uncertainty and time of the urgency. At the same time, different memory levels will also influence the improvisational ability, and then influence the development of new product and strategic change. Thus, the study of how organizational memory influence strategic change through improvisational ability will clarify many problems in practice of improving strategic change.On the basis of this, this study reviews the related literature, defines the object of this study, summarizes the mechanism of the study, proposes the research hypothesis of the relationship between variables, and then establishes a theoretical model in which improvisational ability as an intermediary variable affect the relationship of organizational memory and strategic change. Finally, on the basis of theoretical analysis and a large sample empirical research, this paper collects related data by survey methods, and does factor analysis and regression analysis for survey results with SPSS17.0to demonstrate the proposed theoretical models and research assumptions. The conclusions are as follows:(1) Organization memory level plays an important role on strategic change. That is to say, the higher organizational memory level is, the more obvious the positioning differences and concept differences of strategic change are. Previous studies focus on the influence of strategic change to enterprise performance, and ignore the effect to strategic change. Our research suggests that, memory level is the key element of the success of strategic change, and in the process of strategic change, and managers should fully use the content of memory, such as experience, knowledge, et al.(2) The higher organization memory level is, the more improvisational ability can be improved. This means that the procedural memory and declarative memory will positively act on improvisational ability. Enterprises should re-examine the experience, knowledge in order to realize the success of innovation.(3) Improvisational ability plays a key role on strategic change."Letting go" can help enterprise dealing with the uncertain context in the process of strategic change. The more the resources organizations contain, the better the core competence and competitive advantage organizations will obtain and contain. And making do has a great importance to strategic change.(4) Improvisational ability has a mediating effect between memory level and strategic change. The reason for causing inconsistency or conflict conclusion in the research of the relationship of organization memory level and strategic change in the existing literature is that they ignore the deep research of mediating effect. As the path is so long that the influence of the memory level to improvisational ability is different to discover. This shows from a side that we should state the impact of memory level to improvisational ability with the help of same mediating effect. We introduce improvisational ability as mediating variable to research the mediating effect between memory and strategic change. The result shows that improvisational ability plays a part mediating effect, and managers should highly focus on the role of improvisational ability.