Knowledge Management in Social Work: Management Support, Incentives, Knowledge Implementation, and Employee Empowerment

Abstract

In this article, we build on the current research about knowledge management in social work settings to demonstrate that knowledge management has the potential to enable social work organizations to influence public policies and improve the quality of their services. By increasing awareness and information about knowledge management in the field of social work, our goal is to examine a direct positive relationship between management support and incentives and knowledge implementation. In addition, as we wanted to explore the moderating effect of employee empowerment on knowledge implementation, we define and test several hypotheses in order to discover how management support, incentives and employee empowerment impact knowledge implementation in social work settings. We use moderation regression to test our hypotheses with a sample of 98 managers and employees of social work organizations in Slovenia who completed a questionnaire specifically prepared for the study. The study results support the existence of a significant and positive relationship between management support and incentives with knowledge implementation. Employee empowerment also acts as a moderator in the relationship between incentives and knowledge implementation, however, the interaction term is negative. In any case, the highest levels of knowledge implementation occur when employee empowerment is high as well. In the conclusion of the paper, we discuss the theoretical and practical implications derived from the research study.