The Effect of Knowledge Management Capabilities towards Organizational Innovation in Malaysia’s Hotel: A Conceptual Analysis

Abstract

This study is concerned with the relationship between Knowledge Management Capabilities (KMC) and Organizational Innovation (IO) among Malaysian hotels. World Tourism Organization (2018) highlighted that the tourism industry globally attracted around 1.245 billion international tourists’ arrival, expecting worth trillions of USD around the year 2016. However, due to the Covid-19 pandemic that started in early 2020, it has affected this industry, but subsequently regained slowly since 2022 (UNWTO, 2022). Hoteliers in tourism industry must follow the current trend to sustain in the competitive environment. Therefore, hoteliers must provide sufficient knowledge to their employees in terms of infrastructure and process to deal with organizational innovation. However, many of them still refuse to adapt knowledge management to be innovative organization. As a conceptual paper, this initial stage of the study takes into consideration on the development of knowledge management and organizational innovation. The data were collected from selected hotels among their top management such as managers, managing directors, general managers or chief executive officers that represent three-star to five-star hotels in Malaysia by using simple random sampling from the list provided by the Ministry of Tourism, Art and Culture of Malaysia. The result can be expected to assist organizations including hoteliers to sustain competitiveness in the market.