Towards a Model for Assessing Organizational Unlearning

Organizational forgetting is a very important concept and a complementary concept to organizational learning in knowledge management. Unlearning is often used as a synonym for organizational forgetting. Unlearning means discarding of old routines to make way for new ones. In unlearning, organizations remove their embedded knowledge intentionally. Type-2 fuzzy sets are used for modeling uncertainty and imprecision in a better way because of fuzzy membership function. Therefore, the aim of this study is to present a model for the assessment of organizational unlearning using interval type-2 fuzzy (IT2F) weights. This research is an applied one, and has been carried out according to mixed method in three phases. Based on the previous studies, in the first phase the dimensions of organizational unlearning were recognized. In the second phase the extracted components are prioritized using type-2 Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchical Process (FAHP) based on the opinion of experts, then the organizational unlearning model was designed. In the last phase to clarify the suggested model, an IT company is taken as a case. The survey population consisted of 45 employees and managers of the case. An important part of the results revealed how to use suggested model for unlearning evaluating. in addition, adjusted unlearning and operative unlearning have the best rank among organizational unlearning.