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1. Introduction
Knowledge and learning are essential to organizational success (Pandey and Dutta, 2013; Del Giudice and Maggioni, 2014; Oliva, 2014; Chadwick and Raver, 2015; Aranda et al., 2017) and economic growth (Chen and Dahlman, 2006). For this reason, enterprises seek to convert individual knowledge, which is the combination of information, personal experience and personal understanding, into organizational knowledge. However, this transformation is not easy nor simple (Rechberg and Syed, 2013). Companies, therefore, use a set of knowledge management processes (KMPs), defined as the dynamic activities and practises developed by an organization to process and manipulate its knowledge resources with the aim to produce valuable knowledge (Pinho et al., 2012). Research exploring the impact of different KMPs on the organizational performance of privately-owned companies is very limited (Ali et al., 2010; Daud and Yusoff, 2011; Mills and Smith, 2011; Jayasingam et al., 2013; Ahmed et al., 2015; Tubigi and Alshawi, 2015; Migdadi et al., 2017; Durmuş-Özdemir and Abdukhoshimov, 2018; Dzenopoljac et al., 2018) and has produced inconsistent results. Most of these works have focussed on countries that are initiating or at the midpoint of the process of becoming a knowledge economy according to the knowledge economy index developed by the World Bank (Chen and Dahlman, 2006). However, KMPs are socially embedded phenomena that are affected by institutional and cultural contexts (Hussinki et al., 2017) and the different phases in the transition to the knowledge economy determine the competitive environment, hence, it seems necessary to research new contexts. The impact of KMPs on firm performance in privately-owned organizations in countries with well-developed knowledge economies such as European countries, the USA and the East Asian Newly Industrializing Economies, which have different general competitive conditions (Chen and Dahlman, 2006), constitutes, hence, a first research gap.
Moreover, the relationship between KMPs and performance seems to be more complex than a simple direct relationship because knowledge needs to be embedded in the organization to improve performance (Durst and Edvardsson, 2012). This embedding may be achieved through organizational learning (OL), defined as “the capability of an organization to process knowledge and to adjust its behaviour to reflect the new cognitive situation for the purpose of improving its performance” (Wu and Chen, 2014, p....