Sharmila Jayasingam

Influencing knowledge workers: the power of top management

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify the key leadership characteristics (in the form of social power) needed in a knowledge‐based firm that can influence knowledge workers (KWs) to participate actively in creating, sharing, and using knowledge.Design/methodology/approach – Data measuring top leaders social power and knowledge management (KM) practices is gathered from 402 KWs representing 180 Multimedia Super Corridor status firms in Malaysia.Findings – The analysis indicates that expert power has a positive influence on the extent of knowledge acquisition and dissemination practices. Legitimate power is found to impede knowledge acquisition practices. Furthermore, reliance on referent power no longer works in a knowledge‐based context. Finally, the paper found the impact of coercive, legitimate, and reward power to be contingent on the organizational size.Research limitations/implications – Besides leaders potential to influence, there may be other factors that could influence the extent of...

Knowledge management practices and performance: are they truly linked?

Knowledge management (KM) has often been claimed to be an essential ingredient in building competitive advantage. Yet, KM adoption is relatively slow, especially in the Malaysian context. Most organizations are unsure if the promised performance improvement is just a passing fad. This study intends to provide empirical verifications to support the link between KM practices and performance outcomes for organizations. Responses from 180 knowledge-based organizations were analysed. The analysis indicated that knowledge acquisition and knowledge utilization positively influenced strategic and operational improvement in organizations, whereas the positive effect of knowledge dissemination was only evident in the case of strategic improvement. Organization size had some interesting moderating impact on the tested relationships.

Affective commitment among knowledge workers: the role of pay satisfaction and organization career management

Knowledge workers are highly sought after to help organizations establish their competitive advantage. However, getting them to want to stay with an organization is a challenge indeed. Furthermore, with claims that they are different from traditional workers, it remains unclear as to what will influence them to want to stay. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to determine whether pay satisfaction and career management (opportunity for skill enhancement and mentoring relationship) can influence the level of affective commitment among knowledge workers. Data measuring the abovementioned variables was gathered from 350 respondents representing varied occupation to ensure representation of all levels of knowledge work. Findings indicate that the proposed factors significantly influence the level of affective commitment among knowledge workers engaged in low knowledge work category. For their counterparts involved in high knowledge work, these factors had minimal influence. This paper implies that organizations should refrain from employing generic strategies to improve affective commitment among knowledge workers. Instead, attention should be paid onto the level of knowledge work when selecting the appropriate strategy. This paper incorporated the micro-level characteristic of knowledge work to traditional relationship with emphasis on how different strategies appeal to different knowledge work categories.

Perceived Entrepreneurial Success and Social Power

Based on the leadership, entrepreneurship, and issue selling literature, we hypothesized that entrepreneurs who are perceived to be successful can be differentiated from unsuccessful entrepreneurs based on their degree and type of social power. We conducted a field experiment including 305 Malaysian managers with considerable experience in working with entrepreneurs and in entrepreneurial environments. Entrepreneurs perceived to be successful were ascribed greater referent, information, expert, connection, and reward power; less coercive power; and similar legitimate power than unsuccessful entrepreneurs. These results provide evidence in support of social power as a distinguishing individual characteristic of successful entrepreneurs and make a contribution to theories linking social capital with entrepreneurial success. Aspiring entrepreneurs need to be aware that their social power profile is associated with various degrees of perceived success. Our paper points to the need to investigate variables beyond personality and that are more directly relevant to social and interpersonal interactions that may differentiate entrepreneurs perceived to be successful from those who are not.

Open Innovation in SMEs: Drivers and Inhibitors

Open innovation has of late emerged as a popular innovation management concept that advocates opening up of the innovation processes in firms. Despite researchers writing against open innovation being a new concept, research into open innovation activities of firms, as evidenced by the growing number of related research papers and books, has proliferated. In this concept paper, through a scrutiny of published open innovation research work, we look at the concept of open innovation in general and then zoom in on the factors that drive and inhibit its implementation especially in SMEs. The analysis shows that the drivers of open innovation include meeting customer demand, while employee resistance in the form of not-invented-here (NIH) and not-shared-here or not-sold-here (NSH) syndromes can inhibit open innovation. The paper, with implications for practice and theory, ends with a summary of open innovation and its drivers and inhibitors.

Factors Driving Knowledge Creation among Private Sector Organizations: Empirical Evidence from Malaysia

The Tenth Malaysia Plan (2011-2015) [Tenth Plan] mentioned that in a quest to move from a middle income nation to high income nation, it is crucial for Malaysia to focus on innovation and knowledge-based growth. Despite the increasing attention focused upon knowledge management, particularly in the area of knowledge creation/innovation in Malaysia, organizations have yet to achieve the desired level of knowledge creation. Therefore, this study aims to determine what factors will influence knowledge creation among private sector organizations in Malaysia. This research examined how these four factors - organization culture (sharing culture), organization structure (restrictive structure), Information Communication Technologies (ICT) and Human capital-influences knowledge creation. The social system within the organization which includes knowledge sharing culture and human capital were found to positively influence the extent of knowledge creation. A restrictive organization structure had unexpected effect on knowledge creation whereas ICT was found to be only an enabler and not a driving factor.

Instilling affective commitment: insights on what makes knowledge workers want to stay

Purpose - – This study aims to examine factors that may influence affective organizational commitment among knowledge workers. The five final factors considered in this study include knowledge-sharing culture, autonomy, workplace value identity, promotion practices and, finally, management support. Gender was included as the moderator for the aforementioned relationships. Design/methodology/approach - – A sample of 522 knowledge workers from manufacturing, retail and service sector anonymously completed a structured questionnaire that included measures of the variables of this study. Hierarchical regression was used to test the hypotheses. Findings - – The findings provide evidence on the possible factors that organizations need to focus on and improvise to ensure the “want to remain in the organization” sentiment is enhanced among knowledge workers. Workplace value identity and knowledge-sharing culture were identified as the pertinent factors in influencing affective commitment. Gender was found to moderate the relationship between unfair promotion practice, knowledge-sharing culture and affective commitment. Research limitations/implications - – One obvious limitation is that the sample of this study is sourced from a pool of knowledge workers. This limits our ability to conduct a comparative analysis with non-knowledge workers. Hence, future research could expand the model of this study to compare these relationships among knowledge and non-knowledge worker. Practical implications - – Understanding the impact of these factors in a knowledge-based context helps firms prioritize and focus on important factors that can improve the level of affective commitment among knowledge workers. Doing so facilitates knowledge retention and prevents loss of knowledge. Originality/value - – From a knowledge-based view, this paper identified factors that play an important role in retaining knowledge workers through enhanced affective commitment. With the changing workforce, the findings of this study show how knowledge-sharing culture and achievement orientation dominate affective commitment in a knowledge-based context.

‘I am competent so I can be choosy’: choosiness and its implication on graduate employability

ABSTRACT Employability is always used as a measure to gauge the value of graduates. Hence, most past studies attempted to identify competencies that can enhance the level of employability of graduates today. While these past studies found some competencies to be more important than others, the influence of graduate’s attitude, mainly their level of choosiness were not given due consideration. Therefore, this research sets out to determine how choosiness influences the relationship between competencies and employability. We conducted a field experiment with 244 Human Resources executives with considerable experience in employee recruitment and selection. Naturally, highly competent graduates were considered more employable than their less competent counterparts. However, the level of graduate choosiness reduced their employability. Fundamentally, being choosy has a detrimental effect on graduates’ employability.

A Conceptual Proposition: Does Social Capital Manipulate Knowledge Sharing Enablers' Effect?

This conceptual paper proposes social capital as a possible moderator of the relationship between commonly identified knowledge sharing enablers in the literature and knowledge sharing KS. A literature review was carried out to determine the contextual influence of the level of social capital within communities of practice CoPs. Propositions were developed based on a review of past studies addressing KS enablers and KS. The literature review revealed that prior studies built on resource-based theory RBT and knowledge-based view of the firm KBV focused on organizational enablers of KS without any concern for the contextual influence such as the level of social capital of CoPs. Further analysis indicated that social capital could possibly moderate the impact of commonly identified KS enablers. These insights are presented as propositions in this conceptual paper. This paper addresses a gap in the area of KS. It questions the results of past studies and proposes the needs to consider the level of social capital when identifying appropriate KS enablers.