The Effect of Organizational Memory on Organizational Identity Strength

This study examines the most enduring nature of organizational identity by exploring its relationship with the past in the three metatheories that pervade the literature – social actor, social constructivist and social identity and self- categorization theories. For further exploration, we conceptualize this past as organizational memory. Organizational memory has largely been studied from the perspective of decision making and performance in organizations, but not in connection with organizational identity. The structure of organizational memory is re-examined here with the aid of an empirical qualitative study. This reveals three factors - cultural memory, system memory and HR memory. We follow this with a hierarchical regression to examine the relationship between organizational memory and organizational identity.