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Scholars are increasingly highlighting the role of knowledge management (KM) in achieving better decision making and problem solving (Alavi & Leidner, 2001; Hoq & Akter, 2012). The most prominent literature on KM has viewed it as an organizational initiative - emphasizing the importance of organizational factors that influence KM effectiveness. KM is a system that aims to improve organizational effectiveness (Jennex, Smolnik & Croasdell, 2009). From this perspective, KM success within firms is a function of technological, organizational and environmental factors; including strategy, leadership/management support, knowledge content, processes, technology and structure (e.g. Yew Wong, 2005; Jennex & Olfman, 2005; Jennex, et al., 2009; 2012; Basu & Sengupta, 2007; Lin, 2014; Sedighi, van Splunter, Zand & Brazier, 2015).
That said the literature has focused less on the role of individual employees in the KM discourse (Muhammed, Doll & Deng, 2009; Hoq & Akter, 2012). Scholars focusing on the Human Resources perspective of KM have argued that the human capital has the most potential to serve as a source of competitive advantage (Jiang, Lepak, Hu & Baer, 2012). Employees are supposed to be able to identify and solve difficult and complex problems, counting on their abilities, imagination, creativity and high-level of education (Rao, 2010). Employees – knowledge workers – are the ones who are engaged in knowledge-work activities, and within them resides KM success (Hoq & Akter, 2012). From this perspective, other factors in the KM system are viewed as merely enablers to KM success.
Traditionally KM focused on explicit knowledge (knowledge-codification) and organizational knowledge. Linking the individual-knowledge perspective to organizational success suggests a shift from traditional KM to personal KM (PKM) – focusing on individual and tacit knowledge (Cheong & Tsui, 2011; Muhammed et al., 2009). Knowledge workers add value to organizations due their tacit-knowledge and their ability to transfer it into work activities (Davis, 2002; Mládková, 2012). They depend on their personal-knowledge more than the organizational-knowledge in work activities (El-Farr, 2009). Due to the intangibility of tacit-knowledge, knowledge workers are difficult to manage, yet utilizing appropriate practices to enable them provides organizations with a unique competitive advantage (Mládková, 2012).
How to manage, improve and measure knowledge-work became central in the literature - arguing that effective knowledge-work activities such as knowledge creation, sharing and application are core goals for effective KM systems (Timonen & Paloheimo, 2011; Palvalin, Vuolle, Jääskeläinen, Laihonen, & Lönnqvist, 2015). That said, effective knowledge-work is mostly dependent on the performance of individual knowledge workers who drive the success of knowledge-intensive organizations (Drucker, 1998; Rao, 2006).