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1 – 10 of over 5000The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical and empirical exploration of link between organization intellectual capital and knowledge flows with its incremental and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical and empirical exploration of link between organization intellectual capital and knowledge flows with its incremental and radical innovation performance.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper adopts relevant literature of social capital and organizational learning to examine the impact of intellectual capital and knowledge flows on incremental and radical innovation based on surveying 95 firms. To test the research hypotheses, regression analysis is used.
Findings
Results of the study show that human capital and top-down knowledge flows significantly and positively influence both incremental and radical innovations. Social capital and bottom-up knowledge flows do not have any significant impact on incremental or/and radical innovation. Organizational capital has a positive impact on incremental innovation as expected.
Practical implications
The results offer several practical implications for business managers to harvest its knowledge bases resident in the firm’s different forms appropriately to make innovation successful. Particularly, knowledge resident in human capital and organizational capital is useful for making incremental innovation. Especially, new knowledge, new skills and new perspectives resident in human capital are crucial important for making radical innovation. Both incremental and radical innovations are positively influenced by dynamic managerial capabilities.
Originality/value
This study contributes to literature by providing new evidence linking organization intellectual capital and knowledge flows with its innovation performance. Especially, the missing link between top-down knowledge flows and radical innovation is empirically examined. Value of this study is that social capital and bottom-up knowledge flows are not universally beneficial for enhancing innovation and their impacts on innovation performance are context dependent and more sophisticated than it is recognized in the literature.
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Shahnawaz Muhammed and Halil Zaim
This study aims to focus on a particular type of intra-organizational knowledge sharing that is referred to as peer knowledge sharing. This paper examines how peer knowledge…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to focus on a particular type of intra-organizational knowledge sharing that is referred to as peer knowledge sharing. This paper examines how peer knowledge sharing impacts firms’ financial and innovation performance, and the mechanism through which such a relationship is realized. The study also evaluates the extent to which leadership support acts as a key antecedent to peer knowledge sharing.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing on social capital theory and a knowledge-based view of firms, a theoretical model and related hypotheses are presented for testing. A survey design methodology is used to collect data and test the model. Structural equation modeling is used to test the hypothesized relationships based on data collected from 330 knowledge workers in various service-based organizations in Turkey.
Findings
The results indicate that the extent of employees’ engagement in knowledge sharing behavior with their peers and their managers’ leadership support exert a positive impact on organizations’ knowledge management success, which, in turn, can affect organizations’ innovation performance positively and, subsequently, their financial performance. Leadership support of the immediate manager is found to be an important factor that contributes to the respondent’s peer knowledge sharing behavior. The proposed model’s invariance testing between male and female respondents revealed that peer knowledge sharing’s contribution to knowledge management success may be different in the two groups.
Research limitations/implications
This study contributes to extant research on knowledge sharing by specifically focusing on peer knowledge sharing and reinforcing leadership support’s importance on knowledge sharing. The study also highlights the importance of knowledge management success as an important mediator necessary for linking individual knowledge management behaviors, such as peer knowledge sharing, with organizational performance.
Originality/value
Knowledge sharing is a topic of continuing interest for organizational researchers, yet limited empirical research has been conducted that links individual-level, intra-organizational knowledge sharing to organizational performance. This study examines this linkage and provides empirical support for this relationship, while simultaneously pointing to an important type of knowledge sharing that occurs within organizations, referred to as peer knowledge sharing.
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Young-Gul Kim, Yong Sauk Hau, Seulki Song and Ghi-Hoon Ghim
This study aims at analyzing the features of knowledge flow and the role-specific nodes in knowledge networks among individuals and business units of six organizations in…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims at analyzing the features of knowledge flow and the role-specific nodes in knowledge networks among individuals and business units of six organizations in different industries, and suggesting prescriptions to prevent the organizational knowledge sclerosis.
Design/methodology/approach
This research conducts multiple case studies on the organizational knowledge paths of six companies in the multiple industries through social network analysis (SNA) tool developed by the authors of this paper.
Findings
This study provides four major findings which shed a new light on how to comprehend the features of knowledge flow and the role-specific nodes in knowledge networks in organizations: the within-business unit knowledge flows are more dominant over the inter-business units knowledge flow; the downward knowledge flows are dominant over the horizontal and upward knowledge flows in the management levels; distributions of knowledge owners and providers are like L-shape and the gap between knowledge owing and providing expands as the management levels go up; and the top 20 percent people in an organization dominate over a large portion of the knowledge brokerage activities.
Research limitations/implications
Cultural difference issue might arise because data collection was limited to Korean organizations. Therefore, the findings from this study needs to be cautiously interpreted considering the cultural difference/deeper understanding of the organizational knowledge paths through social network lens can make it possible for more context-specific KM strategies (e.g. suitable for a specific functional unit, management level, or industry type) to be identified and implemented.
Practical implications
Managers can have a solid grasp about knowledge flows and knowledge node roles in their organization through social network analysis in order to facilitate the knowledge transfer and eliminate the knowledge link lapse in organizations.
Originality/value
This study could be a stepping stone for further empirical research since it expanded the level of organizational knowledge network analysis from individual and team to inter-unit and inter-management level through the block modeling analysis of knowledge network.
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Moazzam Ali, Yuanmei (Elly) Qu, Shoaib Shafique, Nhat Tan Pham and Muhammad Usman
The present study aimed to test the hypothesis that ethical leadership positively contributes to exploitative learning and explorative learning simultaneously and then examine the…
Abstract
Purpose
The present study aimed to test the hypothesis that ethical leadership positively contributes to exploitative learning and explorative learning simultaneously and then examine the moderating role of work centrality in the relationships of ethical leadership with exploitative learning and explorative learning.
Design/methodology/approach
Time-lagged survey data were collected from 257 middle managers and their 257 immediate supervisors in 76 firms in China. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling and Hayes' PROCESS macro for SPSS.
Findings
The results revealed that ethical leadership positively contributed to exploitative learning and explorative learning simultaneously. Importantly, the authors found that work centrality strengthened the positive relationships of ethical leadership with both exploitative learning and explorative learning.
Practical implications
The findings can help organizations enhance exploitative learning and explorative learning simultaneously and enable them to gain a sustainable competitive advantage.
Originality/value
Although explorative learning and exploitative learning together constitute fundamental resources for organizations' long-term success, prior research has not looked into whether and when leader behaviors facilitate explorative learning and exploitative learning simultaneously. The study contributed to fill this gap by introducing ethical leadership, signifying its positive role in enhancing both explorative learning and exploitative learning, and establishing work centrality as a moderator to reinforce these two positive relationships.
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Mengling Yan, Yan Yu and Xiaoying Dong
The purpose of this paper is to reveal how organizational learning at the strategic and operational levels (i.e. strategic learning and business learning, respectively) contribute…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to reveal how organizational learning at the strategic and operational levels (i.e. strategic learning and business learning, respectively) contribute to the development of organizational ambidexterity along the growth of enterprises from an evolutionary view.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors conducted a longitudinal single case study on Huawei – a leading Chinese firm in the telecommunication industry. Data were collected from various sources including interviews, senior speeches, scholarly publications, company magazines and other documents, and was analyzed in line with the principles of grounded theory.
Findings
This research reveals that the case company (Huawei) constructed organizational ambidexterity with different foci during different development stages. The organization’s ambidextrous capability evolves over time, shifting from one domain to another. Such ambidexterity development was largely beneficial from the multilevel organizational learning at both the strategic level (focussing on the whole organization and long-term goals) and operational level (focussing on local interests and short-term goals).
Originality/value
This paper represents one of the earliest works to uncover the ambidexterity building process from an evolutionary approach that requires the collection of longitudinal data. Also, the paper proposes a multi-level learning framework for ambidexterity building in practice. This framework distinguishes strategic learning from business learning and projects the two types of learning into learning at four levels-individual, team, intra-organizational, and inter-organizational, which can be leveraged to guide division of labor among hierarchical levels during the progressive development of ambidexterity.
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This paper aims to argue that the current malaise and fragmentation within knowledge management are at least partially caused by a lack of awareness of its own historical roots.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to argue that the current malaise and fragmentation within knowledge management are at least partially caused by a lack of awareness of its own historical roots.
Design/methodology/approach
A comprehensive literature review shows that very explicit knowledge management concepts and practices were in circulation 50 years ago and that current knowledge management literature has very little historical depth.
Findings
The current canonical knowledge management literature almost universally ignores significant antecedents to knowledge management thinking and practice dating back to the 1960s.
Practical implications
There are three practical implications: for knowledge management education to recover its historical antecedents; for KM theorists and practitioners to connect KM theory and practice to historically‐related work in economics, sociology and information management, from which it is currently isolated; through an understanding of its roots to help knowledge management theorists build a meaningful and coherent agenda for the discipline.
Originality/value
This is the most extensive exploration to date of the historical origins of knowledge management, with significant implications for recovering a productive agenda for the discipline.
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The purpose of this paper is to share experience on what has happened in knowledge management in France since the 1980s, for better understanding of cultural influence in holistic…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to share experience on what has happened in knowledge management in France since the 1980s, for better understanding of cultural influence in holistic KM.
Design/methodology/approach
The main method is applying the KM principles, such as continuous feedback from experience, to understand better all facets of the whole process and improve the theories by from field experiments.
Findings
It was found that culture has influence on the way of applying the KM theories in various countries. Taking into consideration the past experience accelerates the progress and experience helps to improve theories.
Research limitations/implications
All facets of knowledge management should be included in an effective/useful research.
Practical implications
A better understanding of the French way of applying the KM principles is produced.
Social implications
This paper makes a contribution to a global KM approach. An impact could be made on education by a new KM culture for knowledge society, capable of successful management in the knowledge economy.
Originality/value
The value is represented by the holistic and system view presented.
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Samer Eid Dahiyat, Suhad Mohammad Khasawneh, Nick Bontis and Mohammad Al-Dahiyat
This study aims to develop and empirically test a “stocks and flows”-based model of intellectual capital (IC) that examines how human-embodied knowledge (i.e., human capital) can…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to develop and empirically test a “stocks and flows”-based model of intellectual capital (IC) that examines how human-embodied knowledge (i.e., human capital) can be transformed into organisational non-embodied knowledge (i.e., organisational capital) through the mediating roles of social capital and the knowledge management (KM) process of knowledge transfer.
Design/methodology/approach
A structural model was developed and empirically tested using a survey data set of 295 questionnaires collected from the “knowledge-intensive” pharmaceutical manufacturing industry in Jordan.
Findings
Empirical results revealed that each of human capital, social capital and knowledge transfer has a positive and significant effect on organizational capital. In particular, knowledge transfer emerged as having the strongest effect. Social capital, on the other hand, emerged as having a positive and significant effect on knowledge transfer. Mediation analysis revealed that while human capital significantly affects organizational capital, such an effect is partially and significantly mediated by each of social capital as well as knowledge transfer.
Practical implications
This study provides senior managers in pharmaceutical manufacturing firms with valuable insights pertaining to the development of their IC, in terms of how to exploit their knowledge stocks (i.e. human-embodied knowledge and organizational non-embodied knowledge) through managing knowledge flows between them. This was shown to be significantly leveraged by the mediating roles of social capital as well as knowledge transfer.
Originality/value
This study provides important theoretical and empirical contributions to the extant literature in a number of ways. It provides better understanding of the intricate linkages among IC dimensions, and how these play complementary roles in organizational capital development. It has also provided important empirical evidence highlighting the vital mediating roles of social capital and knowledge transfer in facilitating knowledge flows, which aid in transforming human-embodied knowledge stocks into organizational-embodied ones.
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The purpose of this paper is to examine possible causes of failure of the commercialization of a high technology innovation, in order to explain the relationship between…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine possible causes of failure of the commercialization of a high technology innovation, in order to explain the relationship between resource‐based view and institution‐based view as a contributing factor.
Design/methodology/approach
The research is based on a case study in a high technology sector. Qualitative evidence and analysis are used to draw some conclusions related to the causes of the failure of the commercialization process.
Findings
The main limitation is that the findings cannot be generalized. Moreover, the analysis is based on the author's individual interpretation and biases.
Practical implications
The case provides guidelines to innovators and entrepreneurs to develop new technologies and their businesses.
Originality/value
The article is based on a real case and it can be used as a base for future research and as teaching material.
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Charles Hanu, Hayford Amegbe, Monica Dede Tekyi Ansah Yawson and Philip Mensah
This study aims to examine the moderating effect of supportive organisational culture (SOC) on the differential impact of work-based learning (WBL) on employee agility…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to examine the moderating effect of supportive organisational culture (SOC) on the differential impact of work-based learning (WBL) on employee agility, ambidexterity and proactive goal generation.
Design/methodology/approach
A cross-sectional survey was conducted using an online structured questionnaire with 443 respondents in Ghana. The data set was analysed using structural equation modelling.
Findings
The outcomes of the study show that WBL has a significant and positive impact on employee agility, ambidexterity and proactive goal generation. However, the effect on employee agility was higher, followed by proactive goal generation and employee ambidexterity. The moderating effect of SOC on H1, H3a and H3b was found to have a decreasing effect.
Originality/value
This study augments knowledge by examining how different approaches to WBL collectively affect proactive goal generation, agility and ambidexterity. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to examine the differential impact of summative WBL approaches on employee outcomes.
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