The role of mediating organizational forgetting in the relationship between leadership styles and organizational entrepreneurship

Leadership style is one of the requirements of an entrepreneur organization which provides the way for creative and entrepreneurial people. To forget bitter experiences while learning from them for not making past mistakes is necessary to move in the direction of organizational entrepreneurship. In other words, the organization should consciously forget in order to facilitate the emergence of new knowledge and experiences. This deliberate forgetfulness requires a precise and effective leadership style in order for the organization to be innovative and entrepreneur.

Reviewing the literature reached little empirical evidence regarding the relationship between leadership styles and organizational forgetting and entrepreneurship. In fact, previous research has investigated paired relationships between variables, but unlike the current research, not simultaneously investigated the three mentioned variables. Therefore, we primarily seek to find a leadership style that is consistent with organizational entrepreneurship. Then, we are to investigate the relationship between leadership styles and organizational forgetting as a mechanism to leave aside the outdated knowledge and improve organizational learning. Finally, we are looking for examining the mediating role of organizational forgetting in the relationship between leadership styles and organizational entrepreneurship.

The research type is applied in regard to purpose and is descriptive-correlational in terms of method. The statistical population was comprised of all managers and employees of Shiraz University 288 of which were selected by conducting stratified random sampling based on Morgan's table. The research instrument, after reaffirming the validity and reliability, includes four measures of transformational leadership style, servant leadership style, organizational forgetting, and organizational entrepreneurship.

Based on obtained results, for Shiraz University staff, there existed positive significant relationships between all variables and components of transformational leadership (subjective encouragement, idealistic influence, inspiring motivation, individual conservation), servant leadership (servicing, humility, reliability, affinity), organizational forgetting (random, purposeful), and organizational entrepreneurship (organizational activities, individual attitude, flexibility, reward status, entrepreneurial leadership, and entrepreneurial culture). The transformational and servant leadership styles of Shiraz University managers were both positively associated with employees’ organizational entrepreneurship. In addition, servant leadership was positively associated with organizational forgetting while the positive relationship between transformational leadership and organizational forgetting was not statistically significant. Therefore, servant leadership directly affected organizational entrepreneurship and indirectly through organizational forgetting. The indirect effect of transformational leadership on organizational entrepreneurship was accordingly removed from the final model.

The present era is the age of knowledge and continuous learning that change is an integral part of it and organizational environments are constantly becoming more dynamic and competitive. According to obtained results, by strengthening transformational and servant leadership styles and their components, it is expected for the organizations to forget the past bitter experiences and pave the way to increase organizational learning and entrepreneurship. Since the current research was limited to a specific university, the other researchers are recommended to perform it on other universities in order to better explaining the relationships. In addition, it is recommended to explore the opinions of faculty members towards the association of these three variables as well as to investigate the opinions of higher education authorities around the mediating role of purposeful organizational forgetting in regard to organizational entrepreneurship.