An Ecological Model for Organizational Knowledge Management

Research in Knowledge Management (KM) has gained distinguished attention in recent years, and different views of methods have been proposed in existing literature. An initial study was the process view that focused on the creation, organization, sharing, and application of explicit and tacit knowledge. Another recent perspective is the resource-based view that emphasizes how knowledge resources can develop organizational capabilities and enhance organizational performance. This paper builds on these past studies and presents an alternative view that examines the dynamic relationships between knowledge and organizational performance. This examination is based upon an ecological perspective that includes the distribution, interaction, competition, and evolution (DICE) among different biological species. From this ecological perspective, a model that consists of knowledge distribution, knowledge interaction, knowledge competition and knowledge evolution is proposed. These four elements interact with each other and evolve to maintain healthy knowledge ecology in an organization. A case study was conducted to support this innovative model. The major implication of the findings is that maintaining healthy knowledge ecology is important for the success of knowledge management in an organization.