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Although ethical climate, trust, satisfaction, and commitment are related to knowledge management (KM), there are at present few studies in which the way ethical climate affects KM through trust, satisfaction, and commitment has been emphasized. Our aim was to fill this research gap by examining different ethical climates in this context. We found that principle- oriented climates of company rules and procedures (CRP) and laws and professional codes (LPC) affected KM positively and directly, the benevolence-oriented climate of team interest (TI) influenced KM positively but indirectly, and the effect of trust on commitment was indirect but fully mediated through satisfaction in TI and LPC. We used structural equation modeling for data analysis to map the relationships between KM practices and the key factors.
Keywords: ethical climate, knowledge management, trust, satisfaction, commitment.
Knowledge is the leading strategic resource for enhancing the competitive strength of organizations (Quinn, Anderson & Finkelstein, 1996; Solow, 1997; Stewart, 1998). Knowledge can help enterprises to survive and become more robust (Lee, 2006). Therefore, effective management of knowledge in organizations is very important (Johannessen & Olsen, 2003). Knowledge management (KM) is affected not only by information technology (IT), but is also influenced by culture (Gold, Malhotra & Segars, 2001). Some researchers have explored KM from a technology standpoint, arguing the need for enhancing competence via the storage, retrieval, and application of knowledge from knowledge management systems. Consequently, enterprises regard IT highly because of the expectation that it will enhance KM performance despite the vulnerability of IT to technological determinism (Tseng & Fan, 2011). Unlike information and data, knowledge exists mentally (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995) and is subjective, dynamic, and personal (Lee, 2006). In addition, because knowledge is power (Glasser, 1999), insufficient trust and commitment from employees may lead to a lack of altruism in sharing knowledge. Luo and Lee (2012) applied failure mode and effects analysis to explore KM failure modes and found that many knowledge items are not uploaded onto knowledge management systems. Instead, in many companies, because of mistrust, they are managed solely by individual departments. Although enterprises endeavor to promote KM effectively, many KM implementations still fail (BenMoussa, 2009). As such, KM performance depends on human interaction and relationship quality rather than technology alone (Szulanski, 1996).
Many researchers have...