KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT, ORGANIZATIONAL AMBIDEXTERITY, AND MANUFACTURING PERFORMANCE IN THE ERA OF INDUSTRY 4.0: A PROPOSED MODEL

Abstract

Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR4.0) is changing the landscape of global manufacturing. As a developing nation, Malaysia’s manufacturing sector is a leading contributor to the nation’s GDP but its growth is in declining mode recently. Facing competition from countries with lower labour cost, Malaysia needs alternative ways to achieve competitive advantage. Many of its manufacturers are new to IR4.0 and also cautious of investing in such technologies to increase its manufacturing performance. Realizing this, Malaysia’s government introduced a policy on IR4.0 by focusing on the people, process and technology. The goal is to increase the skill set of the existing workforce through knowledge enhancement and adoption of advance manufacturing technologies. However, high level of transformation is needed, collaboration with external parties is important, and internal business processes and operating models need to change too. Many of them are lack in slack resources to pursue both explorative and exploitative learning. Organizational ambidexterity, which is the ability of a firm to manage both of these activities is crucial for proper knowledge management and improving manufacturing performance. The objective of this paper is to examine such interconnection from the context of a developing country as information from extant literature is scarce, especially on the balanced approach to source, transfer and protect the knowledge for optimum gain in manufacturing performance. Three main activities of knowledge management will be examined namely external knowledge sourcing, knowledge mobility and knowledge protection. The inclusive of knowledge protection also narrow the literature gap as it tends to be left out in previous studies due to its conflicting nature with other knowledge management activities. All the hypotheses and resulted conceptual model will be grounded with theories of Resource-Based view (RBV), Knowledge-Based View (KBV), Dynamic Capabilities and OA.