6 Conclusions and discussion
The knowledge itself is not the source of competitive advantage for the organization, rather organizational power lies in its use. The goal of knowledge use is to activate the relevant knowledge in order to create value for the organization, because the organizational knowledge should be embedded and employed in new products, services and processes. Distribution and transfer of knowledge is an important part in the knowledge management process. Obtained knowledge within the organization should be generalized and be available to the others through social interactions.
We argued that the social relationships between individuals in an organization can be utilized to produce positive returns. Therefore, we emphasize the role of individual structural importance within an organizational informal communication structure as a mechanism for knowledge flow and increasing the organizational learning performance. Individual structural importance can be considered as a strategic or expert type of knowledge transfer for communication between the individuals within an organization in the sense that such a configuration by reducing the independence of the individuals and increasing the scale of behavior facilitate and speed up collective learning. The results of our analyses show that organizational learning through an informal communication network of people in the form of scale-free connectivity pattern is faster comparing to the small-world connectivity style. Therefore, a more flexible structure among the individuals within an organization allows the existence of hubs and lateral connections and consequently organizational learning performance can be increased.
