دیدگاه مبتنی بر منابع درباره توانایی مدیریت دانش و مزیت رقابتی: بررسی تجربی

The concept of knowledge management (KM) as a powerful competitive weapon has been strongly emphasized in the strategic management literature, yet the sustainability of the competitive advantage provided by KM capability is not well-explained. To fill this gap, this paper develops the concept of KM as an organizational capability and empirically examines the association between KM capabilities and competitive advantage. In order to provide a better presentation of significant relationships, through resource-based view of the firm explicitly recognizes important of KM resources and capabilities. Firm specific KM resources are classified as social KM resources, and technical KM resources. Surveys collected from 177 firms were analyzed and tested. The results confirmed the impact of social KM resource on competitive advantage. Technical KM resource is negatively related with competitive advantage, and KM capability is significantly related with competitive advantage.

The field of strategic management focuses on understanding sources of sustained competitive (Barney, 2001 and Priem and Butler, 2001). A variety of factors have been shown to have an important effect on the ability of organizations to acquire sustained competitive advantage, including the relative capability development of a firm (Johannessen & Olsen, 2003), and a firm's ability to differentiate its products (Johannessen and Olsen, 2003 and Teece et al., 1997). Knowledge management has also been described for its possible role in creating sustained competitive advantages for organizations (Grant, 1996, Johannessen and Olsen, 2003 and Lado and Wilson, 1994). While the allegation that KM might be able to create sustained competitive advantage for firms is provocative, working in this area is relatively underdeveloped, both empirically and theoretically. Research on KM and competitive advantage has emphasized ‘description, rather than empirical study’ KM can lead to such an advantage (Holsapple and Singh, 2001 and Ndlela and Toit, 2001). A potential framework for augmenting the conceptual analysis of KM's effects on organizational competitive advantage is the resource-based of the firm which links the competitive advantage of organizations with resources and capabilities that are firm-specific, and difficult to imitate or substitute. The resource-based view is currently the dominant theoretical perspective in strategic management literature, and focuses on costly attributes of a firm which are seen as the fundamental drivers of competitive advantage (Becker and Huselid, 1998 and Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998). Adopting a resource-based perspective of KM, researchers have argued that the sources of firm external knowledge are easily duplicated by competitors. Rather, it is how firms leverage their KM resources to create unique knowledge management capabilities that determine a firm's overall effectiveness (Gold, Malhotra, & Segars, 2001). Thus, despite uniformly high KM resources and capability tend to be heterogeneously distributed across firms, leading to different patterns of KM use and effectiveness. However, only a limited number of studies have explored the resource-based view of KM, and the analyses to date have been mostly conceptual. The purpose of this paper is to employ the resource-based perspective to develop the theoretical links and empirically examine the association between KM capability and competitive advantage. Sine the resource-based view explicitly recognizes the important of KM resource and capability, it offers a significant opportunity to explore these theoretical complementarities in examining the relationship between KM resources and competitive advantage.

The results of this study were to draw on the resource-based perspective of the firm to explicate the nature of a firm's KM capability and its relationship to competitive advantage. This study contributes to the growing body of literature linking KM and the resource-based view and provides a framework for understanding how knowledge management may be appropriately viewed as an organizational capability. The study provides an empirical test of the resource-based view of knowledge management, and provides a two-fold identification of KM resources in terms of technical KM resource, and social KM resource and develops the notion of KM as an organizational capability created by the synergistic combination of KM resources with other organizational resources and capabilities. The empirical analysis examines the association between social KM resource and competitive advantage and finds the relationship to be positive and significant. For instance, Shaping cultural factor is crucial for a firm's ability to manage its organization effectively (Chase, 1997, Gold et al., 2001 and Lee and Choi, 2003). Employees also play a very crucial role in creating the right KM resource; they have the knowledge in their heads and should be encouraged to innovation product (Ndlela & Toit, 2001). However, our study shows positive relationship among human KM resource, structural KM resource, and cultural KM resource and competitive advantage. The results also serve to inform the discussion about the business value of technical KM resource. It suggests that the inconsistent statistical findings about the relationship between technical KM resource and competitive advantage may be attributed to our incomplete understanding of the nature of a technology resource and its KM capability and to the fact that competitive advantage serves as a poor relationship. For example, technical KM resource and competitive advantage are uncorrelated, may be due to the fact that despite high IT assets, not all firms are successful in creating technical KM resource and capability. Given the complexity associated with creating a firm's competitive advantage, in any sample of R & D spenders, only a small subset of the sample is likely to have the right technical KM resources in place for achieving competitive advantage. Other firms are more likely to have incurred the technical KM resource without comparative parity in competitive advantage. Thus, technical KM resource is found to be negatively significant predictors for competitive advantage. By establishing the link between KM capability and competitive advantage, the study serves to inform business managers that firms need to be effectively managed for overall KM capability. First, organizational competitive advantage is self-assessment, which requires firms to assess their own strengths and weakness. To identify and appraise a firm's KM capability, managers must look broadly and deeply. Second, effective management of social KM resource involves a variety of different aspects, from providing organizational structure and culture that encourage and support employees to create continuous learning cultures in organization and establishing mechanisms that enable effective knowledge sharing and dissemination. Finally, KM capability is a socially complex organizational capability that can only be imperfectly imitated by competitor. A firm's KM capability derives from underlying strengths in overall KM capability. The technical KM resource provides the platform to launch innovative KM applications faster than the competition; the social KM resource enable firms to conceive of and implement such innovations faster than competition; and a focus on KM capability enables firms to leverage or exploit organizational competitive advantage. The limitations suggest strategic KM for additional research. Although the analysis indicates that superior KM capability leads to sustain competitive advantage, the underlying mechanisms through which this is achieved are by no means clear. The purpose of this study was to explore the possibility of a positive relationship between KM capability and competitive advantage. Much more rigorous studies must be completed to ascertain antecedent and consequent relationships between KM capability and competitive advantage.