Content area
Full Text
Abstract
In this era of knowledge economy, a firm will enhance its productivity, business flexibility, and creativity by using its accumulated knowledge in a wide variety of processes to improve its competitiveness in the marketplace. In addition to general business knowledge management (KM), human resource management (HRM) measures also support and guide management activities, which increases the value of knowledge. The purpose of this study is to propose a framework which investigates the interaction of HRM and KM from the viewpoint of core employees and organizational performance achievements. The results show that HRM practices including work design, recruit selection, training development, performance evaluation and salary and rewards contribute to the knowledge acquisition, knowledge creation, knowledge dissemination and knowledge accumulation. We explore the importance of harmonious coordination between HRM and KM.
Keywords: core employees, human resource management, knowledge management, organizational performance
Introduction
In this era of the knowledge economy, the collective knowledge, skills, and capabilities of the employees have become important sources of the firm's competitive advantage (Becker and Gerhart, 1996; Pfeffer, 1994). Knowledge sharing among employees can create new knowledge and enhance innovative capability of a firm (Kogut and Zander 1992; Wu and Cavusgil 2006; Camelo-Ordaz et al. 2011) and human resources are the core focus of HRM (Prieto-Pastor et al. 2010). HR generates "human capital advantage" through recruiting and retaining exceptional human talent that provides value and cannot be easily imitated by other organizations. Lopez-Cabrales et al. (2006) demonstrated that the value and uniqueness of core employees' knowledge, skills, and abilities help develop organizational capabilities and contribute to organizational efficiency. Recent studies have stressed the need to strengthen jointly in KM and HRM through a bridge between both literatures (Svetlik and Stavrou-Costea 2007; Prieto-Pastor et al. 2010; Man-Soraya and Kok-Wai 2010; Camelo-Ordaz et al. 2011). However, little literature discussed the impact of HRM practices, particularly the core employees, on KM practices. Thus, this paper is to investigate the interaction between HRM and KM from the viewpoint of core employees and organizational performance.
To develop and promote employees' knowledge and technical capabilities, an organization's human resource management (HRM) should systematically design and implement procedures for recruiting, training, compensating, and evaluating the performance of employees. These measures should be adjusted and updated in accordance with...