Do we know what really drives KM performance?

The purpose of this paper is to identify the several key drivers for developing organizational KM capability and examining their relationships with KM performance. It shows that despite the active interest in managing organizational knowledge as a strategic resource, most organizations do not yet understand the challenges involved in implementing KM initiatives.

In the paper data was collected from a questionnaire survey of 66 Korean firms. The structural equation modeling technique called Partial Least Squares method was chosen for analyzing the research model.

The paper found that KM drivers such as learning orientation, KM system quality, reward, and KM team activity were significantly related to the organizational KM performance – knowledge quality and user knowledge satisfaction. The paper also found that a KM team activity and a reward system have significant effects upon other KM drivers. In addition, the KM stage of an organization was found to have a significant and positive effect on KM team activity.

The paper shows that the sample consists of organizations from only one country, which reduces the generalizability of the results obtained. The paper also shows that the KM stage of the respondent organizations is skewed toward the low stage, which also reduces the representativeness of our sample.

The results of this paper are helpful for researchers to examine and identify the characteristics of KM that may enhance certain outcomes of KM. The paper also shows that a KM team can obtain some direction toward understanding and evaluating KM performance.

This paper identifies the key management drivers to improve KM performance.