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The importance of e-literacy of staff in the digital life is fundamentally very crucial, to such an extent that it is considered as one of the primary conditions for successful utilization of knowledge management processes using social technologies within organizations. This study aims to explain and test a novel conceptual model to show the impact of applying social technologies on knowledge management (KM) processes in the context of Iranian organizations, considering the moderator role of e-literacy of employees.

Based on an in-depth study of the relevant literature, a questionnaire was designed. The sound questionnaires obtained from our sample size was 207 and respondents were experts in the field of information technology (IT) within the Central Office of Insurance companies in Tehran. The collected data were analyzed using structural equation modeling and path analysis.

The results indicate that the use of social technologies with the factor loading of 0.57 has the highest impact on knowledge exchange and 0.61 on knowledge utilization. In addition, the results indicate that e-literacy with the factor loadings of 0.69 and 0.74 has the highest impact on knowledge exchange and knowledge utilization, respectively. In addition, the impact of social technologies with the factor loading of 0.82 has the highest impact on e-literacy.

One of the limitations of this study was the generalizability of the findings, which may be limited, as it is focused on one developing country. Also, the lack of full implementation of KM and the use of social technologies in the insurance industry may affect the obtained results.

To the best knowledge of the authors, this study is among the first of its kind which examines the impact of social technologies usage on the KM processes considering an important variable, i.e. e-literacy of employees.