First, this study supports that the social OKC is a higher-order construct and comprises structural, cultural, and human knowledge capability. Although the social KM resources and capabilities involve complicated concepts and characteristics, the dimensions of culture, structure, and human resources are worth a more advanced analysis. The aspect of cultural capability drives the common affection and cognition for prompting knowledge in an organization. Furthermore, the capability also provides support for the climate of knowledge innovation. For example, the firms which encourage coordination and cooperation among their members in knowledge communication and exchange will achieve effective project outcomes. The facet of structural competency provides better internal or external inducements for creating and sharing knowledge. For instance, employees contributing their knowledge to organizational repository may ascribe to economic pay or career advancement from the firm’s commitments. The view of human capability suggests that an organization should put more attention to construct interpersonal or social networks for enhancing the interaction among organizational members. For example, a knowledge community, which is defined as groups of people with a collective passion to create and share the knowledge network, increases the organizational cohesion and consolidation for interpersonal knowledge collaboration.
Correspondingly, the regulative result supports the original conceptualization of the social OKC.
6.2 The relationship between OKC and knowledge sharing
Since knowledge sharing is a challenging task, the results of this study suggest that the enhancement of organizational knowledge capabilities can foster sharing behavior. If an
organization possesses more organizational capabilities in combining knowledge resources to generate new capabilities, then the knowledge sharing is promoted to be more effective.
Based on the results, we find that the technical OKC, the social OKC, the structural and human knowledge capabilities all exert significant influences on the knowledge sharing activities.
Technology can support codification and interpretation of information in the behavior of knowledge sharing. Information and communication technology (e.g. e-mail, on-line forums, or search engines) are the important and well-known resources for organizational knowledge sharing; however, the technical knowledge and capabilities are more essential than the information technology itself. The technical OKC emphasizes knowledge integration in an organization through the information infrastructure capability conducted on knowledge sharing – that is, the more technical knowledge the organizations own, the more their members intend to share knowledge.
The social OKC, an integrated second-order construct, has a positively effect on knowledge sharing. Compared with the technical OKC, the influence of the social OKC is superior to the technical OKC on the behavior of knowledge sharing. In other words, technical enablers are useful in lifting a few barriers to motivate people to share their knowledge, but it can hardly be expected to promote the willingness of knowledge sharing. As the survey of Mason and Pauleen (2003), the social enablers (soft aspects of KM), including sharing culture, trust, and people relationship, can attain knowledge collaboration within organizational colleagues, which are the primary supports when firms implement KM programs. The results are consistent with Handzic’s findings. Handzic (2004) revealed that a perceived importance of KM system on social aspect is relatively greater than that on technical concept. However, at the most cases, when the firms implement KM still focus on the technical view, the firms will fail in knowledge transfer and sharing. The awareness of KM has to put more concerns on the social factor such as sharing culture, motivation mechanism, and collaboration relationship.
In addition, the structural knowledge capability accents on the development of a mechanism including organizational regulation and an incentive system. The incentive system, including reward, compensation, promotion, and prizes, can encourage individuals to contribute their professional knowledge to the organization. The organizational regulation, a common ordinance to foster knowledge sharing behavior within the firm’s members, is composed of a subjective norm, political directive, and a procedure design. A fine structural knowledge capability enriches the individual’s motivation for knowledge sharing. Beyond identified effects, the human knowledge capability concentrates on establishing the
relationship between people and social network for the effective knowledge sharing. At the Toyota’s case, a highly interconnected and strong tie network is created for encouraging firm members to participate the activities of knowledge sharing, which is effective at the diffusion of tacit knowledge (Dyer and Nobeoka, 2000). Thus, the quality relationships could improve the trust among a firm’s members and they might further promote the members’ attitude and intention of knowledge sharing in an organization.
The cultural knowledge capability has a non-significant influence on knowledge sharing behaviors, which is contradictory to the proposed hypothesis. Three reasons might explain this result. First, in an organization, culture is an intangible resource which can affect many organizational activities (e.g. organizational learning, marketing strategy, or decision making), but it is difficult to form, cultivate, and measure. Although the cultural knowledge capability stresses the support of the collaborative atmosphere, it is helpless for establishing an organizational culture. In other words, the cultural knowledge capability has a non-significant effect on business culture, which in turn further affects knowledge sharing to be ineffective.
Second, culture could be an indirect factor to drive knowledge sharing by means of other resources or capabilities. For example, some researchers reveal that a knowledge sharing culture is affected by organizational commitment (Connelly and Kelloway, 2003) and creates a context for social interaction (De Long and Fahay, 2000). Bock et al. (2005) demonstrated that an organizational climate has both direct and indirect effects (mediated by a subjective norm) on knowledge sharing. Third, culture consists of multi-faceted concepts. This study adopts building up organizational collaborative contexts and valuing organizational knowledge as the measurements of cultural knowledge capability. Although the content validity of this variable is acceptable, it might not be suitable to solve the problem of knowledge sharing in this study. The societal culture which might affect knowledge sharing behavior is elaborated, i.e. the tendency of knowledge sharing in East Asian and Western societies is different (Lee and Suliman, 2002; Moller and Svahn, 2004). The respondents of this study are an independent case in Taiwan, and further exploration into other countries is suggested. Summarily, the cultural knowledge capability has a positive relationship with knowledge sharing which is not supported. Advanced research to test the mediated variables between cultural capability and knowledge sharing is a path for future work.
6.3 IT/IS Support and Technical OKC
Combining with the concept of RBV, we might conclude that if the firms provide more
resources, more mature capabilities would be developed. In this study, the technical OKC is considered as a capability to integrate and deploy knowledge by using ICT effectively. The firm members use information technology effectively to perform knowledge processes which involve many technical supports, including automobile QA system, on-line practical communities, content management system, corporate yellow page, data mining, and intelligent agent. Based on the result of empirical test, we can conclude that the more supportive on KM technologies, the more powerful on KM capabilities. The positive result between IT/IS support and technical OKC shows that the company provides more IT/IS support to KM activities, the firm will accumulate more technical capabilities to knowledge organization. The finding not only verifies the theory of RBV through empirical design, but also enhances the importance of organizational knowledge capabilities.
However, providing static IT/IS systems and tools is not enough. The complete training on the use of IT resources is more important. The organization should encourage employees to utilize IT/IS effectively for achieving their works.
The RBV of the firm would suggest that the firms should attempt to establish IT capabilities through deploying resources effectively. The behavior of knowledge sharing occurs when the technological capability is mature in an organization.
6.4 The effects for a firm implementing KM
The most important concern in KM is to acquire strategic advantages by performing knowledge effectively. Therefore, KM tends to develop organizational capabilities for achieving effective knowledge sharing. This study reveals that the firms performing a KM program help improve the organizational knowledge capabilities and knowledge sharing.
Since knowledge sharing is the primary object when firms conduct KM program, the result is obvious that a firm implementing KM can lead to more employees participating in the activities of knowledge sharing. Therefore, implementing KM is an effective program to help knowledge exchange in an organization. However, knowledge sharing behavior is affected by a variety of factors, an organization need to discover the better drivers to encourage the behavior of shared knowledge.
The distances in the structural knowledge capability are the most significant and in cultural knowledge capability they are secondary. This shows that businesses conduct more efforts and invest more money to improve organizational structure (i.e. encourage the sharing of knowledge by an incentive system) and organizational culture (i.e. establish friendly and
collaborative surroundings) when firms plan to implement KM. Moreover, the human knowledge capability is also significant. The KM program usually enhances the understanding among employees. Then, it encourages the learning, cooperation, and collaboration, and further creates the organizational profits.
In contrast, the technical knowledge capability does not be improved when implementing KM into a business, but its mean score is higher than the other knowledge capabilities – that is, the technical knowledge capability belongs to firms’ owning mutual skills, which are easy to form and accumulate within organizations. Following the development of information technology, many firms already have established IT-based systems to support business related activities and IT acceptance has been improved increasingly in the past decade. Therefore, the technical knowledge capability is a fundamental necessary skill, but is not a sufficient condition in a knowledge organization.
Consequently, the implementation of KM program is actually contributive to the improvement of knowledge sharing and organizational knowledge capabilities.
Chapter 7 Conclusion
The contribution of this study is to propose an integrated knowledge sharing framework to explore the relationship among IT/IS support, organizational knowledge capability, knowledge sharing, and organizational effectiveness. The framework is based on the theories of RBV, KBV, socio-technical view, organizational capability view, and KM. The proposed framework is tested using the statistics analysis with questionnaire data collected from the different industries and institutions. Consequently, seven hypotheses are fully supported as expected, but one hypothesis is not confirmed and another hypothesis is partial support. The results also provide an important viewpoint for developing organizational knowledge capability in order to acquire the strategic advantage during the implementation of the knowledge activities.
A knowledge-based organization focuses on developing interpersonal, structural, and network relationships to achieve effective knowledge sharing and to further generate new knowledge or capabilities for organizational competitiveness and success. The purpose of this study is to elaborate upon some capability variables which can affect the knowledge sharing behavior and organizational effectiveness through the socio-technical view. By identifying these capability factors as the determinants of shared knowledge, firms can deploy and significantly reorganize their resources and capabilities for the organizational activities of knowledge sharing. Besides, IT/IS support is helpful to improve the technical knowledge capability.
This study emphasizes the importance of social and technical OKC on knowledge sharing, but it does not address the issue of how the organizational knowledge capability should be carried out. In fact, this is a significant organizational and managerial research issue in how to form and create organizational knowledge capability in a firm. An application of this study in the future work may be in identifying the antecedents of organizational knowledge capability (e.g. the effects of various incentives on SKC), constructing the interactions among the knowledge capabilities (e.g. integrating HKC and SKC to create social network), and exploring the other capabilities or competencies dimensions (e.g. taking the influence of process knowledge capability into account or extending the constructs of technical capability).
Furthermore, the other statistics technology (e.g. multivariate analysis) can be applied to an advanced analysis on the relationship among the organizational knowledge capabilities, knowledge sharing, and organizational performance through a detailed model. This study
focuses on the investigation over the intra-organizational capabilities and sharing behaviors.
The future research might be to explore the knowledge activities from knowledge sharing to knowledge creation, or to conduct the behavior of knowledge sharing on the cross-organizational or the multinational corporations.
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