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

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.

Keywords:

• knowledge management theory
• knowledge management practice
• social capital
• dynamic capability

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jurriaan van Reijsen

About the authors

Jurriaan van Reijsen, M.Sc., obtained his masters in Business Informatics at Utrecht University. Since 2006, he has been a Ph.D. candidate at Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University. His research interests and publications are in the field of knowledge management, social network analysis and dynamic capabilities. He is a reviewer for various international conferences in the Information Systems and Knowledge Management domains. Also, he is the founder of Comprehend, the platform that connects his research findings to business practice.

Remko Helms

Remko Helms is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Information and Computing Sciences at Utrecht University, where he teaches Knowledge Management and Strategic Management of ICT. His research focuses on knowledge management with a focus on knowledge-sharing networks and social media. He regularly reviews for various Information Systems conferences and journals, is the department editor for Connected Scholars at the Association of Information Systems and co-founder of the International Association for Knowledge Management (E-mail: [email protected]).

Ronald Batenburg

Ronald Batenburg obtained his masters at Utrecht University and his Ph.D. in 1991 at Groningen University. Afterwards, he worked at the Universities of Utrecht, Tilburg and Nijmegen as Assistant Professor in organization science. Since 2000, he has been an Associate Professor at Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University. Since 2009, he has also been a programme coordinator at the Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research (NIVEL), focusing on organizations and labour markets, specifically in relation to IT and health care (E-mail: [email protected]).

Ralph Foorthuis

Ralph Foorthuis is currently a Senior IT Architect at UWV. He has worked at several organizations as a business and IT architect, systems analyst, database designer and developer. He has studied at the University of Amsterdam, where he obtained his masters in both Informatics and Communication Science. He holds a Ph.D. in Information Systems and has published multiple articles on enterprise architecture, projects and compliance (E-mail: [email protected]).