دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی ارزیابی جامع بودن شیوه های مدیریت دانش - امرالد 2017

Introduction

Value creation has shifted from tangible factors, such as financial capital, land, and machinery, to intangible resources of production, such as knowledge (see Penrose, 1959; Barney, 1991; Kogut and Zander, 1992; Grant, 1996; Spender and Grant, 1996; Del Giudice and Maggioni, 2014). The debate surrounding KM has gained momentum during the past two decades, emerging as a significant avenue for management research. KM deals with the practices and processes that enable efficient and effective management of knowledge resources (Alavi and Leidner, 2001; Garrido-Moreno et al., 2014; Chen and Fong, 2015).

Empirical, firm-level KM research has focused on two areas: One has examined how generic knowledge processes (e.g. knowledge sharing, acquisition and creation) are linked with firm performance outcomes (Darroch, 2005; Chen et al., 2010; Lee et al., 2013; Del Giudice and Maggioni, 2014; Garrido-Moreno et al., 2014; Ferraris et al., 2017). The other avenue has investigated the interconnection between KM practices and performance outcomes (Singh, 2008; Chen and Huang, 2009; Hsu et al., 2014; Inkinen et al., 2015; Ardito and Messeni Petruzzelli, 2017). In a fundamental divergence from knowledge processes, KM practices are purposeful organizational and managerial activities aimed at managing the organizational knowledge resources (Foss and Michailova, 2009; Foss and Minbaeva, 2009; Andreeva and Kianto, 2012; Kianto and Andreeva, 2014).

Implications and conclusions

This study provides interesting findings regarding the universality of KM practices. This section discusses the implications for theory and practice of KM, the study’s limitations and some future directions for research.

Implications for theory

This paper demonstrates that the managerially assessed structure of KM practices in Chinese, Finnish, Russian and Spanish firms with over 100 employees was not universal. It confirms that KM practices such as supervisory work, knowledge protection, learning mechanisms, organizing work, and knowledge-based recruiting are widely recognized management activities within firms from very different countries; thus, those practices provide evidence for the universality of KM practices. However, a handful of country-specific peculiarities pointed out cross-sample variance within the theorized structure of KM practices. Therefore, researchers should be aware of the potential context-based dissimilarities within the KM concepts; in other words, they should expect that the theorized structures will not always hold true in their entirety.