The relationship between organizational agility and knowledge management in Agricultural Jihad Organization: A Case study in Tehran

The agricultural sector is one of the most important economic and social sectors of the country that needs proper management to achieve the goals of agricultural and rural development. Knowledge management (KM) and organizational agility (OA) are two important strategies in managing organizations. KM refers to resources that are systematically designed to foster the most effective learning and lifelong learning in the organization and includes such components as acquisition, storage, transfer and application of knowledge. OA also includes such components as the ability to create change, flexibility, accountability, collaboration, training and learning in the organization. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between KM and OA is in Agricultural Jihad Organization, Tehran branch.

This research was an applied one in terms of its aims and survey in terms of its data collection procedures. The statistical population includes 450 agricultural Jihad staff. Out of these, 207 were selected and included in the sample using Cochran formula. The research instrument was a standard questionnaire that consisted of three parts: 1) biographical characteristics of the respondents, 2) questions related to organizational agility, 3) questions related to knowledge management. The instrument for assessing knowledge management was used with 23 items and 4 variables including: knowledge acquisition with 4 questions, knowledge transfer with 6 questions, knowledge storage with 6 questions, and application of knowledge with 7 questions; all items were anchored on a five-point Likert scale. The organizational agility questionnaire was used by Zhang (2012), with 27 items and 4 variables including: quickness with 7 questions, responsiveness with 6 questions, flexibility with 7 questions, competency with 7 questions; all items were anchored on a five-point Likert scale. Statistical analysis was performed using SPSS software and Smart PLS. The main variables of this study included organizational agility, knowledge management and individual variables.

The results showed that there was a significant relationship between organizational agility and knowledge management, and among the components of organizational agility, the component of "ability to create change", "flexibility" and "ability to respond" were the most important determinants and played an important role in this regard. The results about knowledge management components showed that "knowledge application" by an effect coefficient of 0.902 had the highest impact on dependent variable of KM. The items including "knowledge transfer", "knowledge acquisition", and "knowledge storage" were other important components by coefficients of 0.894, 0.720, and 0.474, respectively.  

The results of this study showed that there was a positive and significant relationship between organizational agility and knowledge management in Agricultural Jihad Organization, Tehran branch. This means that increasing each component of organizational agility leads to an increase in knowledge management vice versa. Given that the most important dimension of organizational agility in this study was "ability to make a change", an agile organization would be able to identify and make changes in the organizational environment. In this regard, it is recommended to use educational programs to change management techniques in order to achieve organizational mobility.