When knowledge management meets HR strategy: an exploration of personalization-retention and codification-recruitment configurations

Abstract

The resource-based view and the knowledge-based view are important developments in strategic management theory, and ‘knowledge management’ has exploded in the popular management literature. There is, however, little empirical literature that explores the connections between firms' attempts at knowledge management and their HR strategies. In this paper, we focus particularly on links between knowledge management and staffing practices. High-technology manufacturing was selected as the site of our research, as high-technology firms rely on highly skilled employees to innovate and develop new products and are therefore an ideal environment for exploring the strategies employed for both managing knowledge, and recruiting and retaining employees. Drawing particularly on the work of Hansen et al. (1999), this paper identifies and explores two fits between knowledge management and HR strategy or what we call KM-HR configurations: ‘personalization-retention’ and ‘codification-recruitment’. We argue that there is no one way to manage knowledge and its links to HRM and build a simple framework of potential KM-HR configurations with propositions for future research.

Keywords:

• Knowledge management
• human resource strategy
• resource-based view
• knowledge-based view
• competitive advantage