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The impact of knowledge management and social capital on dynamic capability in organizations

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Knowledge Management Research & Practice

Abstract

The Holy Grail in strategic management is the Dynamic Capability (DC) of organizations to realize sustainable competitive advantage. This requires organizations to continuously sense market changes and adapt their resources and routines accordingly, for which they are heavily dependent on knowledge. Knowledge as an antecedent for DC is, however, understudied. Inspired by the recognition of knowledge as an antecedent for DC, this paper sets out to uncover how organizations can foster DC from a knowledge management (KM) perspective. In an empirical survey on 55 knowledge-intensive organizations, we studied DC in organizations from two key perspectives on knowledge: formal, through the adoption of KM policies, and informal, through the availability of social capital. Our research results show that, although a formal KM approach strengthens DC, the availability of social capital appears unrelated to DC. The paper concludes with a practical outlook on advancing DC.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Jurriaan van Reijsen, Remko Helms, Ronald Batenburg & Ralph Foorthuis

  2. Open University, Heerlen, The Netherlands

    Remko Helms

  3. Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Ronald Batenburg

  4. UWV, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Ralph Foorthuis

Authors
  1. Jurriaan van Reijsen
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  2. Remko Helms
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  3. Ronald Batenburg
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  4. Ralph Foorthuis
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jurriaan van Reijsen.

Appendix

Appendix

Figure A1

Figure A1
figure 3

Curve of NKM adoption and DC.

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Figure A2

Figure A2
figure 4

Curve of social capital availability and DC.

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Table A1

Table A1 Correlations between the latent variables (with √AVE shown on diagonal)
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Table A2

Table A2 P-values for correlations between the latent variables
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Table A3

Table A3 Correlations between the individual measures of NKM adoption, social capital availability and DC, including their P-values
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van Reijsen, J., Helms, R., Batenburg, R. et al. The impact of knowledge management and social capital on dynamic capability in organizations. Knowl Manage Res Pract 13, 401–417 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/kmrp.2013.59

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