The main goal of business development is to obtain a superior competitive advantage and organizational performance for a firm’s sustainable growth. Prahalad and Hamel (1990) emphasized the organizational competitiveness that comes from the core competence in the enterprise.
Concerning a firm’s growth, the achievement of organizational performance is the most significant objective. The measurement of organizational performance, usually as a dependent variable in many research studies, is widely recognized from multi-faceted perspectives including financial performance, business performance (e.g. operational domain), and organizational effectiveness (Venkatraman and Ramanujam, 1986). Generally, the effects of knowledge activities on performance are shown in a wide range of domain; therefore, the term
‘organizational effectiveness’, the broadest concept to reflect performance in the research of strategic management and organization theory, is adopted in this study. Organizational effectiveness, including multiple criteria or predictors – for example, profitability (Tippins and Sohi, 2003), operational efficacy, and market share (Choi and Lee, 2002), is ordinarily referred to how well a firm achieves its strategic goals.
Moreover, the operationalizations of effectiveness variables are generally classified into two types. First, the objective information includes financial indices such as ROI, ROA, and ROS (Calantone et al., 2002). For example, Vandenberg et al. (1999) believed that a truly effective organization can be observed by two valid measures: financial performance (ROE) and overall employee turnover rate. Second, the perceptual measurement which is compared to competitors by self-assessment is an indirect approach to acquire the sensitive information (Choi and Lee, 2002). For example, Tippins and Sohi (2003) asked the respondents to report how well their firm performed in profitability, customer retention, and sales growth relative to all other rivals. Both the types are usually shown in a variety of management literature.
Chapter 3 Research Design
The development of research theme is a creative process through theoretic exploration, literature analysis, and practical cognition that enterprises need. The relationship between knowledge management and organizational performance is a hot issue that many firms desire to recognize. However, KM is a wide variety of processes involving knowledge identification, retrieval, storage, sharing, transfer, creation, and application. Of all the related KM activities, knowledge sharing is the most interesting topic that firms concern about. Thus knowledge sharing behavior is assumed to explore in this study. KM strategy is regarded as the methodology when firms implement KM activities. Three knowledge strategies (techno-centric, human-(techno-centric, and socio-technical) are studied through a series of literature reviews.
In this study we emphasize a holistic aspect covering social and technical dimensions to explain organizational knowledge strategy – that is, the socio-technical view is adopted to examine the constituent of knowledge resource and capability. Besides, the theory of capability based is also an important perspective to understand organizational core competencies for achieving competitive advantage. The infrastructural knowledge capabilities which are adopted in this study are considered as primary research variables including multifaceted factors such as technology, culture and structure to affect organizational development. To summarize, this study aims at constructing an integrated framework to explore the relationship among capabilities, knowledge sharing, and organizational effectiveness through socio-technical knowledge strategy, which is shown in Figure 3.1.
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Figure 3.1 Research design
The integrated framework based on four theories or perspectives is proposed to explore the relationship among resources, capabilities, behavior, and effectiveness. First, the technologic resource is considered as an effective IT/IS support to promote technical capability based on resource-based view (RBV). The theory of RBV stressed that firms are essentially profit-orientated entities endowed with a variety of tangible resources to manage, control, and use them effectively through the improvement of capabilities. Next, knowledge is regarded as a specific intangible resource and capabilities are clearly noted as “intermediate transformation ability” between resources and objectives (Dutta et al., 2005). Therefore, this study adopts the viewpoint of knowledge capabilities for operating organizational resources to drive knowledge activities more effectively, which draws from the theories of KBV and organizational capability. Third, there are four types of organizational resources (culture, structure, people, and technology) and two categories of organizational knowledge capabilities (social OKC and technical OKC) that are identified by the knowledge strategy of socio-technical view. In this study, socio-technical view considers knowledge sharing as a harmonious process that needs to be promoted by both top-down managerial intervention and bottom-up employee involvement (Ekbia and Hara, 2006). Lastly, firms implement knowledge activities that aim at attaining organizational profitability and growth, which is the primary purpose of knowledge management.
Therefore, this study provides four assumptions: (1) IT/IS support is regarded as an technological resource to enable the refinement of technical knowledge capability; (2) organizational knowledge capabilities can affect knowledge sharing behavior through an effective deployment of knowledge resources (Yang and Chen, in press); (3) knowledge sharing is contributive to product innovation and process improvement based on successful cases (e.g. Ford and Toyota) and literature supports (Moller and Svahn, 2004; Nelson and Cooprider, 1996; Yang et al., 2002); (4) there exist better capabilities and behaviors when firms have implemented KM programs. We thus propose a holistic framework to link these relationships which are shown in Figure 3.2.
Consequently, an integrated framework based on the theories of RBV, KBV, and organizational capability in a socio-technical perspective is proposed to test the relationship among IT/IS support, organizational knowledge capabilities, knowledge sharing behavior, and organizational effectiveness. Moreover, the implementation of KM as a comparative condition to test the effects on research variables is also examined. Accordingly, this study sets forth nine hypotheses and assesses them empirically.
IT + Knowledge based view (KBV)
Knowledge Management (KM)
OKC: Organizational knowledge Capability
Figure 3.2 Research framework