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This paper examines the effect of the most common type of organizational knowledge management system, that is, an intranet-based knowledge repository, on the level of creative performance of an individual. An experiment was conducted on more than a hundred individuals to investigate the quantitative and qualitative levels of creativity outcomes on an open-ended business task. Their levels of baseline creativity skills were also measured in order to inspect its interaction with knowledge reuse. The results suggest that knowledge reuse resulting from this repository type of knowledge management system actually inhibits the creative performance of individuals, especially on the qualitative dimension.

Entering the new millennium, business enterprises are facing more and more rapid and complex changes in their competitive environments. In order to survive, management not only needs to make decisions quickly, but also needs to make them innovatively [16] and [22]. The abilities to generate creative ideas that are both novel and valuable are now considered to be an essential organizational resource in establishing sustainable competitive advantage [6], [9] and [29]. The effectiveness of using information technology to facilitate individual creative performance has long been a prominent research focus (e.g. [8], [18], [20] and [21]). With the growing interests in organizational knowledge management, the possibility of creativity support via knowledge reuse is gradually gaining attention. This paper describes an empirical study that attempts to examine the effects of knowledge reuse – provided by an intranet-based knowledge repository – on individual creativity outcome, with particular interest in the potential contingency effect of the baseline creativity of an individual. That is: (1) Does knowledge reuse enhance or delimit the creativity outcome of an individual? (2) Does the level of enhancing or delimiting effect differ on a creative person from an unimaginative person?

The findings of our study clearly establish two central propositions. First, personal characteristics, such as the baseline creativity skills, do have significant moderating effects on the influence of knowledge reuse on the creative performance of an individual. Second, knowledge reuse does have very different, if not opposite, effects on the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of the creativity outcome. Thus, management and system designers should take caution in designing and promoting KMS in their organizations in order not to produce negative impacts on their organizational performance. Specifically speaking, system designers should avoid taking a “one size for all” approach in KMS design. Knowing that a particular type of KMS or facility can benefit an unimaginative individual but impair a creative one, system designers should provide multiple channels or methods in achieving the same task; or at least provide options to bypass the features that are deemed to be undesirable by the user. On the other hand, while contribution of knowledge to the KMS could safely be encouraged, the usage of the KMS should not be made mandatory. Management should be aware that promoting or exerting pressure on the adoption of a newly developed KMS to all employees without differentiating on their personal characteristics may produce a negative effect on the overall organization performance; defeating the very purpose of the original knowledge management initiative. Furthermore, system designers should pay attention to the different or even opposite effects of a particular system feature of the KMS on the quantitative and qualitative aspects of users' creativity outcome. For example, while providing explicit, codified knowledge may seems to increase the number of ideas that a creative person can generate, the quality of the resulting ideas may be significantly lowered. Hence, for tasks such as discovering hidden patterns or meanings and suggesting alternative uses of existing resources, where the idea count is more important, a simple explicit knowledge repository may help. But for tasks such as formulating public policy and developing marketing campaign, where the quality of idea is more important, other brainstorming, problem-solving, and alternative evaluation features should be supplied instead. Creativity does not arise from vacuum; nor does it depend wholly on one's personality. External facilitation such as knowledge reuse does have significant effect on one's creativity performance. In view of the fact that nearly all knowledge-based works have some creative contents, facilitating creativity will become more and more a required component of corporate strategy for every organization. Nevertheless, as the role of IT in supporting tacit knowledge transfer and reuse is still largely in doubt, the design and use of the current generation of KMS – which mainly focus on the storage and retrieval of explicit, codified knowledge – should be cautiously managed so that individual creativity is not unintentionally suppressed. It is hoped that by understanding how the determinants influence individual creativity and how they interact with each other; management is better equipped to develop a suitable organizational soil for the seeds of creativity to grow.