---Investigating the Effect of Organizational Unlearning on Organizational Performance Given the Mediator Variable of Organizational Agility

Extended Abstract
Today, organizations are faced with rapid changes in the environment which forces them to adapt and select. Rapid technological developments, increasing risks, globalization, and privatization expectations are environmental characteristics that current organizations are faced with them. With these conditions, organizations can survive in a business environment that is more flexible and able to adapt to the environment.
The concept of organizational agility is one of the methods that has been taken into consideration by researchers in the last decade. In the past, it was believed that agility was achieved through sophisticated technologies, but recent research findings show that flexible production is dependent on agile people rather than technology dependent (Sherehiy, 2007).
Skill and diversity of knowledge are one of the main characteristics of agile organization. Integrating and expanding this knowledge throughout the organization are the challenges which knowledge management is seeking to answer. Especially in environments where the competitive environment is advanced technology and there is also an uncertainty in them. Organizational learning is one of the subsets of knowledge management and is considered as an indicator of survival. The organization will also be faced with a huge amount of useful and useless information which are accumulated in the memory of the organization. in some cases, this additional information has been a barrier to rapid movement and slows down the agility of the organization. So, some of this useless information must be erase intentionally and consciously from the organization's memory or in other word, keep the organization's memory up to learn new knowledge and agility of the organization by unlearning. Unlearning is as important as acquiring new knowledge. So, Lack of ability to unlearning is one of the most important weaknesses of organizations (Hedberg, 1981).
Today, Balanced Scorecard Model is one of the approaches used for pathology and performance assessment of organizations, it looks at the performance of the organization with a vast vision. This model evaluates the performance of the organization Based on four financial perspectives, customer, internal processes, and learning and growth. Because it doesn’t focus only on financial perspectives, it can give the results more accurately to the officials of the organization. So that they carry out the necessary measures and adjustments in the direction of the organization's excellence.
The current research is aimed at Investigating the Effect of Unlearning on Organizational Performance Through the creation of organizational agility in the branches of Tejarat Bank in Lorestan Province, because the banks in terms of performance gains depend heavily on new technologies and they must respond quickly to environmental changes, in other words, it must be agile and flexible.
Case Study
The statistical population of this research is all employees (1600 person) of Tejarat Bank in Lorestan Province and 320 persons of them was selected as a statistical sample by using stratified random sampling method.
Materials and Methods
In terms of purpose, this is an applied research and due to the data collection method, this is a descriptive research. The research method is also a survey research. In addition, the correlation method is used in this research.
To collect data, a researcher-made questionnaire was used with three components of organizational unlearning, organizational agility and organizational performance with balanced scorecard approach. The reliability of organizational learning was 0.85, the reliability of organization agility was 0.87 and the reliability of organizational performance was 0.91, which are indicating a desirable reliability. In order to confirm the validity of the questionnaire, in addition to using experts' opinion in this field, Varimax orthogonal was calculated and so the factor loading of all questions was higher than 0.5, the validity of the questionnaire was confirmed.
Multivariate regression test and confirmatory factor analysis (software AMOS18) are used to analyze information.
Discussion and Results
Hypotheses:
- Hypothesis 1: Unlearning has a significant effect on organizational performance.
- Hypothesis 2: Unlearning has a significant effect on organizational agility.
- Hypothesis 3: Organizational agility has a significant effect on organizational performance.
 
The two critical indicators of CR and P are used to test the significance of the hypotheses. Based on the significance level of 0.05, the critical value should be greater than 1.96. Therefore, all hypotheses are confirmed.
Conclusion
By conducting this research, we concluded that in the studied organization (Tejarat Bank in Lorestan Province), if we achieve organizational agility by unlearning, we will get better performance. Therefore, organizational agility seems to be necessary as a concept to achieve a better functional level. Organizational agility dimensions: the enrichment of the customer, mastering the changes, levering the effect of information and individuals and ultimately cooperation for competitiveness have respectively the most effect on the agility of the organization. Functional dimensions of the balanced scorecard (domestic, customer, financial, growth and learning): Customer, domestic, financial, growth and learning have respectively the most effect on performance. As you can see always the most important factors of performance measurement is not a financial issue. The customer factor has the largest share between the dimensions of agility and performance, because customer satisfaction can be considered very important in the present age, especially in customer-oriented organizations such as banks and also customer satisfaction factor creates a long-term relationship with the organization and as a result, it makes better performance of the organization.
Based on the research results, the problem of organizational unlearning is very sensitive, and its correct implementation in the organization's agility path has a positive effect on performance indicators. This means that in unlearning of knowledge useless layers, some knowledge should be remove from the organization which reduces the agility and the competitive advantage of the organization. Therefore, it is suggested that, studying enough about the knowledge that we want to remove in the organization in unlearning in order to remove knowledge layers which undermine the performance of the organization; Helping to increase responsiveness to environmental change and its flexibility with continues research and inspection about obsolete old knowledge and deleting them to the organization; By connecting with the environment, the organization will help attract customers and loyalty in order to get updated information.