How are managing the generational succession plans the organizations of the Basque Country? Barriers and Channels

Enfoque

Introduction: The retirement of baby-boomers will bring drastic changes to organizations (García, 2020). The majority of companies do not have strategies to keep internal knowledge, thus, there is no existence of generational succession plan to transfer employees´ knowledge (Islam et al., 2015). Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays a pivotal role in driving digital transformation, especially when it comes to tools for knowledge transfer. Organizations are aware of the negative consequences that could bring not having a knowledge transfer procedure for employees (Barabaschi et al., 2021). However, for the time being, it is still not a priority for many companies.,

Objectives: The main aims of this research study are (O1) to analyse which is the general perspective of the generational succession plans in the organizations of the Basque Country and to (O2) identify which are the main points for an efficient generational succession plan in order to transfer the knowledge between employees and maintain the organizational knowledge within the company.

Methods: This sample is constituted by 173 companies from the Basque Country in the service, industry and distribution sectors. In this research 49.7% of the companies are small (1-100 employees), 23.1% of the companies are medium size (101 – 250 employees), 9.3% of them are medium-large (251-500 employees) and 17.9% are large companies (+500 employees). Data was collected via an ad-hoc questionnaire, created in Qualtrics where quantitative and qualitative data were obtained. This questionnaire is focused to analyse the strategies used by organizations to retain knowledge in the organization.

Results: (R1) According to the results of this study 55,4% of Basque companies state that the knowledge transfer in the generational change is not a strategical priority in their organizations. (R2) In terms of the perspective of the Basque companies about the main points to consider of an efficiency of generational change and generational succession plans are the following: knowledge transfer, strategical renovation, organizational innovation, professionalization of the job position and organizational culture.

Discussion: Considering the concerns of the Basque companies, it would be interesting for future research lines to analyse data related to generational change in business companies in a national level to cover up the diversity within the business sectors in Spain. This analysis will facilitate understanding which is the state of art of the knowledge transfer strategies within the organisation of the territory and will give opportunity to improve the techniques that are used currently in the organizations. These applications will help organizations maintain their competitiveness on the market and will provide a better retention of organizational knowledge having direct effect on the internal efficiency (Bixby, 2020).