Managing Organizational Knowledge by Unlearning? A Systematic Literature Review

After the comprehensive attention, organizations have turned out to be progressively informed of the real worth of knowledge management. Surely, organizational learning and knowledge assets are recognized as an efficacious instrument for its competitiveness. However, another significant factor in organizational knowledge which needs recognition in this modern debate that continuous learning is not always the case for being competitiveness, it is also about unlearning the organizational knowledge at the right times. Despite the continuous expansion of organization unlearning (OL) studies, there is still a lack of a clear notion of the organizational Unlearning. The study aims to investigate how has the research work in the concept of organizational unlearning evolved in the knowledge management (KM) area? What factor influence organizations to unlearn their knowledge? A systematic literature review is employed on the guidelines of Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA). Providing the Inclusion/Exclusion criteria, 26 papers are determined from the Scopus database for the data synthesis. Research finds that roughly 85% of the selected papers are published within ten years. By following all the explanation, common understanding of organizational unlearning is the creation of the ground to facilitate the new knowledge and its application. Unlearning can be unintentional or deliberate, harmful or profitable to the organization, but in both circumstances, it has a direct impact on organizational competitiveness. The study identifies that individual role is considered as an important enabler of organizational unlearning and their role such as manager is vital to manage both unintentional & intentional unlearning. The descriptive analysis also shows a lack of empirical studies in the organizational unlearning field.