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Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to report the results of an exploratory investigation of the organizational impact of knowledge management (KM).Design/methodology/approach -A search of the literature revealed 12 KM practices whose performance impact was assessed via a survey of business organizations.Findings -KM practices were found to be directly related to organizational performance which, in turn, was directly related to financial performance. There was no direct relationship found between KM practices and financial performance. A different set of KM practices was associated with each value discipline (i.e. customer intimacy, product development and operational excellence). A gap exists between the KM practices that firms believe to be important and those that were directly related to organizational performance.Research limitations/implications -The majority of the research constructs were formative, thus improving the measurement of KM practices will prove vital for validating and extending these findings. The findings were based solely on organizations from North America and Australia and may not reflect KM practices in other geographic, economic or cultural settings.Practical implications -This study encourages practitioners to focus their KM initiatives on specific intermediate performance outcomes.Originality/value -The paper examines the relationship between KM practices and performance outcomes. It was expected that a direct relationship between KM practices and organizational performance would be observed. It was also expected that organizational performance would mediate the relationship between KM practices and financial performance. These expectations were supported. KM practices showed a direct relationship with intermediate measures of organizational performance, and organizational performance showed a significant and direct relationship to financial performance. There was no significant relationship found between KM practices and financial performance.

Management is communication intensive and, therefore, managers may derive benefits from computer-based alternatives to the traditional communication modes of face-to-face (FTF), telephone, and written memo. This research examined the use of electronic messaging (EM) by ongoing management groups performing a cooperative task. By means of an in-depth multimethod case study of the editorial group of two daily newspapers, it examined the fit between the interactivity of the chosen communication mode (FTF vs. EM) and the mode of discourse it was used for (alternation vs. interaction/discussion). Two propositions were derived from this exploratory study. The first proposes that FTF, being highly interactive, is appropriate for building a shared interpretive context among group members, while CMC, being less interactive, is more appropriate for communicating within an established context. Groups exhibiting effective communication will use FTF primarily for interactive discourse and EM for discourse consisting primarily of alternating adjacency pairs. The second proposes that to the extent that the appropriate communication modes are chosen, communication will be more effective.

Electronic communication has been proposed as a key technology enabling new organization forms and structures, work designs, and task processes. This view assumes that organization structure and form can be defined in terms of communication linkages among organizational units. Communication is a social process, however. Therefore, to better understand the potential for these technologies to enable fundamental organizational change, we must understand how existing structures and social contexts influence patterns of organizational communication. This research examined the use of electronic messaging by ongoing management groups performing a cooperative task. By means of an in-depth multimethod field study of the editorial group of two daily newspapers, it examined the influence of the groups’ social context on the patterns of face-to-face and computer-mediated communication. The results show that different groups using the same functional structure and performing the same task with identical communication technologies, but operating within different social contexts, appropriated the communication technology differently and in a way that was consistent with and reinforcing to their existing social structure. This finding suggests that researchers must, at the very least, explicitly take into account social context when studying the effects of introducing technologies which may alter group interaction. Additionally, researchers should look to social context as an important explanatory construct to be explicitly varied and investigated with regard to effects and outcomes of these technologies. The findings also suggest that managers must diagnose and explicitly manage the social context of the workplace prior to implementing technologies, if their intent is to restructure the patterns of interaction and information exchange in support of new organizational forms.

Strategic theories of organizing are grounded in the notion that organizations should configure their internal resources and capabilities to address competitive opportunities and threats. The knowledge-based view suggests that knowledge may be the most enduring and strategic resource. This chapter presents a taxonomy for describing resources, capabilities and competitive environments in terms of four distinct yet related knowledge processing requirements or “problems”: complexity, uncertainty, equivocality and ambiguity. Each suggests a particular knowledge processing capability. The taxonomy is used to develop finer-grained distinctions regarding knowledge-based theories of the firm and the resource-based concept of inimitability.