The influence of organizational design on knowledge transfer

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how organizational design – particularly, delegation, and extrinsic and intrinsic reward systems – impacts employees' knowledge transfer in the context of Spanish small nonprofit organizations.Design/methodology/approach – A quantitative analysis using data from a sample of 105 Spanish small nonprofit organizations obtained by means of a postal survey was performed using the partial least squares (PLS) approach, in order to test the research hypotheses.Findings – The research findings show that delegation involves a greater use of rewards and these, in turn, improve knowledge transfer. Considering the results obtained it is possible to conclude that, due to lack of technical knowledge, managers of these nonprofit organizations must delegate decision rights to qualified employees and that they should use a higher degree of rewards, both intrinsic and extrinsic, especially the intrinsic ones, to motivate employees to mutually transfer knowledge efficiently.R...