The Importance of Communities of Practice Linked to Knowledge Management Activities

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After developing and testing a research model (See Figure 2-3), concerning the effects of KM activities supported by organisational and technological initiatives have on individual, team, and organisational levels. The results provide some potential valuable insights for theories and practice on knowledge management.

First, the study provides empirical support to the argument inherent in social capital theory, the knowledge-based theory of the organisation, and the theory of knowledge management that the impacts of knowledge management move up from individuals to teams and then to the entire organisation. Individual performance affects organisational performance, although this impact does not occur directly, but through its effect on team performance and the effects of team performance on organisational performance. Therefore, this study highlights the importance of communities of practice linked to KM activities to individual level knowledge.

This study is an important finding, as it demonstrates the importance of communities of practice not only to the individuals and their teams, but to their entire organisation as well. Universities that continue to invest in the intellectual growth of their individuals will continue to reap rich returns via growth in organisational knowledge.

Second, this research provides valid and reliable measures which senior managers can use as a valuable tool to assess and benchmark the various KM activities of their staff with that of their best work place. Knowledge worker productivity is an important issue in the light of increasing amount of such work in the current economy. The KM activities as measures in this research are found to significantly impact the performance outcomes of such w...

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...l performance. This finding may be due to several possible reasons. First, it may have been a consequence of the more technical nature of the items used to measure organisational performance outcomes. If that is the case, it would be interesting to see whether KM activities benefit more from technological progress. Alternatively, the low beta of organisational performance outcomes might simply show that organisations are only beginning to experiment with them.

Finally, the results contribute to both behavioural and cognitive theories providing empirical evidence for relationship between the constituent variables in the context of knowledge management at all levels. The results also confirm several similar relationships proposed by Porras and Robertson (1992) in their framework used to analyse organisational change/development based on social cognitive theory.

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