Knowledge Management
Masume Amiri; Mohammad Reza Farhadpour
Abstract
IntroductionThe long-standing efforts of companies to maintain success by using price and quality strategies along with important dimensions affected by continuous global communication such as agility, flexibility, innovation, and sustainability have caused knowledge to appear as the main competence ...
Read More
IntroductionThe long-standing efforts of companies to maintain success by using price and quality strategies along with important dimensions affected by continuous global communication such as agility, flexibility, innovation, and sustainability have caused knowledge to appear as the main competence of success (Lin, Chang & Tsai, 2016). The life of organizations in the knowledge economy is based on information, knowledge, and learning and beyond conventional resources such as capital, labor, and land (Stephen, 2016 & Joshi, Farooquie & Chawla, 2016) as a valuable and effective element in performance (Ahmad Kassim, Fazli Baharuddin & Abdul Samad, 2016) and its maintenance is stable. Knowledge preservation is the process of absorbing and storing valuable knowledge for future use (Ramona & Alexandra, 2019) and preventing its wastage through leaving the job of specialist employees (Alameri et al, 2019) and preventing the effective negative consequences of knowledge loss in performance and competition (Schmitt, Borzillo & Probst, 2012; Lin et al., 2016; Massingham, 2018; Rashid, Clarke & O’Connor, 2019). Despite the increasing importance of knowledge preservation in creating a competitive advantage, ignoring the factors affecting it makes it difficult to achieve the goals of knowledge management. Therefore, the current research aims to answer the question of whether information technology capabilities have an effect on the relationship between individual, group and organizational factors with knowledge retention in Khuzestan Steel Company by focusing on the employees of Khuzestan Steel Company.HypothesisAccording to the review of previous studies and the existence of sufficient research support regarding research variables, the following hypotheses were proposed.H1) Information technology capabilities have a significant effect on the relationship between individual factors and knowledge retention in Khuzestan Steel Company.H2) Information technology capabilities have a significant effect on the relationship between group factors and knowledge retention in Khuzestan Steel Company.H3) Information technology capabilities have a significant effect on the relationship between organizational factors and knowledge retention in Khuzestan Steel Company.Literature ReviewThe results of the review of the research background showed that there is a necessary theoretical support for the research hypotheses. At the individual level, for reasons such as trust, habits, and cultural influences, existing knowledge may prevent the retention of new knowledge. To accept and absorb new knowledge, trust is a fundamental issue; because people generally have to trust the provider of knowledge. According to McDowell (2002), the factors related to trust in knowledge include epistemic trust (trust of the receiver of the message to the communicator because he has corrected and accurate information) and social trust (the value of communication and the reliability of the source from a social point of view), and the inferential effects of communication means the effect of the receiver's perceptions of the conformity of the socially acceptable behavior of the communicator and his inference of trust). Another individual factor is functional stability (individuals' tendency to represent objects as conventional problem-solving functions, resulting in an inability to see their new functions) (Anderson, 2000; Ashforth & Fried, 1988; Cohen, 1991; Cohen & Bacdayan, 1994; Leonard-Barton, 1992; Leonard-Barton, 1995; Nonaka & Reinmoeller in O’Toole, 2010). The result of the review of the research history shows that knowledge retention is one of the concerns of knowledge management (Lin et al., 2016), it requires the preservation of skills, abilities, experience and knowledge vital for the organization (Mishra & Uday Bhaskar, 2011; Schmitt et al., 2012) and refers to extracting tacit knowledge and storing it in organizational memory in order to retrieve and use it in the future (Mishra and Udi Bhaskar, 2011). Therefore, the review of the studies shows that the retention of knowledge as a macro goal has been given less attention in the studies.MethodologyIn terms of the purpose of this research, it was applied research that was conducted using the causal-correlation method. The statistical population of the research was all the employees of Khuzestan Steel Company, totaling 15,000 people, of which 555 people were selected as a sample. A questionnaire with a five-point Likert response scale was used to collect data. The questionnaire was developed based on the tools of previous studies. For this purpose, the 25-item questionnaire of Rohman, Eliyana, Purwana & Hamidah (2020) regarding individual, group and organizational factors, the seven-item questionnaire of Lin et al. (2016) for the knowledge retention variable, and the five-item questionnaire of Trieu, Van Nguyen, Nguyen, Vu & Tran (2023) were used. In this research, a qualitative method was used to determine the face validity, and Cronbach's alpha coefficient was also used to check the reliability of the questionnaire, and the results indicated the appropriate reliability of the research questionnaires.ResultsThe results of the bootstrapping analysis show that the effect of information technology capabilities on the relationship between individual factors and knowledge retention in Khuzestan Steel Company is confirmed. Also, in the results of the second hypothesis test, the claim of the researcher about the effect of information technology capabilities on the relationship between group factors and knowledge retention in Khuzestan Steel Company is confirmed. The results of the third hypothesis test also showed that the effect of information technology capabilities on the relationship between organizational factors and knowledge retention in Khuzestan Steel Company is confirmed.ConclusionBased on the results and from an organizational point of view, the culture and structure of the organization should be such that, on the one hand, it values knowledge activities and encourages employees to engage in knowledge activities. On the other hand, the organization should establish a link between work processes and knowledge by developing information technology infrastructure. In addition, storing and organizing people's knowledge will reduce the organization's dependence on external resources. Therefore, it is suggested that the managers of Khuzestan Steel Company implement human resources strategies in the direction of motivation, trust building, encouragement and reward, participation and cooperation, individual development and empowerment, strengthening the sense of organizational belonging, succession planning, maintaining human dignity, developing knowledge culture, working group, team atmosphere, organizational structure and information technology strategies should be reviewed and strengthened in the form of identifying the capabilities and capacities of existing technologies, creating the required technological infrastructure.
