The role of organizational climate in the use of knowledge management systems to support problem-solving.

摘要

Organizations are investing heavily in the development of knowledge management systems (KMS) to improve the integration of knowledge across different contexts (for discussion see, Davenport & Prusak, 1998a), with the hope of fostering new insights and producing innovation (Zack, 1999). Yet many KMS initiatives fail to meet expectations (Gallivan, Eynon, & Rai, 2003). To address this problem, this research investigates how knowledge workers' innovativeness and knowledge reuse are affected by different aspects of organizational climate and the KMS they use to support their everyday work. One context in which organizations often apply KMS to improve performance is technical support. A model is proposed that describes causal connections between KMS characteristics, perceived usefulness, KMS use, time pressure and support for innovation, and innovativeness and knowledge reuse as performance outcomes. To date, little empirical research has considered the joint effect of characteristics of technologies and aspects of organizational climate, despite the fact that the fit between technology and the work environment may provide added explanatory power not available through simple examinations of direct effects of either (Gray & Meister, 2003). After surveying 150 technical support agents from seven companies, 110 respondents provided data that provided strong support for both the measures and the model. Hypothesis testing revealed that the use of KMS positively affects both knowledge reuse and innovativeness; that organizational climate plays a significant role in the use of KMS; that experts perceive KMS more important under time pressure than novices; and that support for online action is more useful in environments with high time pressure than in environments with lower time pressure, suggesting that building systems with good search features is especially important when users of KMS work under time pressure. In addition, employees who perceive there to be high levels of organizational support for innovation find the support for online action less important than those who perceive low support for innovation. Hence, organizational support for innovation can reduce the importance of support for online action, and even systems without very good support for online action will be perceived as useful.