Abstract

The quest for a better way of enhancing firm performance has led to the discovery of knowledge as a unique and firm-specific resource for achieving competitive advantage. Knowledge management has gained the attention of practitioners and scholars in recent times. Knowledge management involves obtaining the right set of information and making them available to the right people, at the right time. When an adequate knowledge management system is in place, employees can create, share and re-use knowledge. Existing literature shows that knowledge management is still evolving and factors like intellectual capital, innovation and knowledge application play a significant mediating role in its effect on firm performance. Also, knowledge management processes ought to be followed by effective knowledge management implementation strategies to avoid knowledge proliferation and structuration. Modern businesses are gradually evolving from document-based knowledge management systems towards people-based knowledge management systems as a result of higher capacity for improvement and alignment of knowledge management strategies. Modern businesses also try to foster the effectiveness of their knowledge management process through gamification. Several challenges and limitations to knowledge management like organizational culture, lack of knowledge sharing incentive, cultural differences, lack of proper information structures and change management issues were also identified.   Key words: Knowledge management, tacit knowledge, implied knowledge, knowledge management theory, knowledge management system, knowledge sharing.

Highlights

  • In past years, organizations improve their effectiveness and efficiency by eliminating redundancy and minimizing manual labor through the introduction of automation or machines, the results of this process did not yield the expected outcome, especially in the new age of knowledge workers

  • The quest for a better way of enhancing firm performance has necessitated the use of knowledge management among practitioners and this has gained the attention of scholars in recent times

  • Knowledge management comprises a range of management practices to create, identify, store, diffuse, replicate and apply knowledge within organizations

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Summary

INTRODUCTION

Organizations improve their effectiveness and efficiency by eliminating redundancy and minimizing manual labor through the introduction of automation or machines, the results of this process did not yield the expected outcome, especially in the new age of knowledge workers. They advised executives to develop standard criteria for identifying the kinds and volume of organizational knowledge that ought to be captured, stored and retrieved in a structured manner in order to sustain productivity and innovation capacity This position is similar with that of Raudeliūnienė et al (2018), who emphasized that the knowledge management process is incomplete without a knowledge implementation strategy and an evaluation of such strategy. In practice, it is observed that some organizational cultures do not encourage this free flow of information, adopting more formal structures of communication that do not support knowledge management Another challenge to the use of knowledge management is the poor incentives that accrues to employees who deploy the use of tacit knowledge (such as intuition, gut feeling etc.) in the discharge of their duties, especially when it significantly improves organizational performance. Knowledge management is limited by cultural barriers to informal means of information diffusion

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