Building organizational capability: A study of knowledge management practices, reasons, and results

Organizations are increasingly confronted by tremendous challenges, including competition, globalization, the economy, regulation, outsourcing, advances in technology, and the rapid creation of new knowledge. Knowledge management is a strategy that helps to address these challenges because it supports organizations in increasing their competitive advantage by leveraging the intellectual capital already present in the organizations. The purpose of this quantitative study was to identify the reasons human performance improvement (HPI) practitioners use knowledge management practices and the effectiveness they attribute to using knowledge management practices to increase organizational performance. This study also tested a hypothesis that there was a significant statistical relationship (p ≤ .05) between HPI practitioner perception regarding the use of knowledge management to increase efficiency by using knowledge to improve production processes and HPI practitioner perception of the improvement of worker efficiency and/or productivity through knowledge management practices. To conduct the study, a quantitative survey was sent via e-mail to members of two HPI professional organizations. Study participants shared information on their views related to knowledge management practices, the importance of reasons for using knowledge management practices, and the effectiveness of results for knowledge management practices in increasing organizational performance. Using descriptive statistics and factor analysis, it was found that though there are many reasons HPI practitioners use knowledge management practices, the majority of reasons fall within the dimension of human capital enablement. In terms of the effectiveness HPI practitioners attributed to using knowledge management practices to increase organizational performance, study results find that market effectiveness was the most significant factor related to effectiveness of results. A chi-square analysis showed that there was a statistically significant relationship between HPI practitioner perception regarding the use of knowledge management to increase efficiency by using knowledge to improve production processes and HPI practitioner perception of the improvement of worker efficiency and/or productivity through knowledge management practices.