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1 Introduction
Knowledge management (KM) has become increasingly important as organizations realize that effective use of knowledge assets and resources provides them with the ability to innovate and respond to fast changing customer expectations, and help support a range of vital operational and innovative activities ([71] Sandhawalia and Dalcher, 2011). Organizational knowledge is the capability members of an organization have developed to draw distinctions in the process of carrying out their work, in particular concrete contexts, by enacting sets of generalizations whose application depends on historically evolved collective understandings ([83] Tsoukas and Valdimirou, 2001, p. 976). Organizational knowledge loss can be defined as the intentional or unintentional evaporation of knowledge that accumulates from learning and from individual and collective actions ([67] Perrott, 2007). In this paper, we study unintentional knowledge loss only. Intentional knowledge loss and explicit unlearning are not addressed. Knowledge loss is used as a synonym of organizational knowledge loss. The unit of analysis is the organization.
Various perspectives were used in the literature to discuss the effects of a firm's KM efforts. Whereas [11] Cohen and Levinthal (1990) emphasized the properties of organizational units (e.g. absorptive capacity), others focused on the properties of relationships among units such as the network structure in which the units are embedded ([68] Reagans and McEvily, 2003). Other studies emphasized the properties of knowledge such as its taciteness ([63] Nonaka, 1991) that promotes or inhibits the company's KM efforts to prevent knowledge loss. The human resource (HR) ([78] Swart and Kinnie, 2003), KM ([73] Shafer et al. , 2001), and operations management (OM) ([38] Jiang et al. , 2009) literatures have addressed the issue of organizational knowledge loss from different perspectives reflecting advances in their respective fields and drawing on existing and popular concepts in the literature.
The HR literature has studied knowledge loss from an employee turnover perspective. HR practices such as motivation and reward systems ([55] Menon and Pfeffer, 2003) were mentioned among suggested retention strategies to reduce knowledge loss in organizations. The KM literature adopted the knowledge-based view to study how the retention of tacit knowledge ([44] Lane and Lubatkin, 1998) and the generation of combinative capabilities ([28] Grant, 1996) decrease firm exposure to knowledge loss. The KM literature built on such popular concepts...