Search results for "KNOWLEDGE"
showing 10 items of 3108 documents
Overcoming Cultural Distance in Social OER Environments
2014
Open educational resources (OERs) provide opportunities as enablers of societal development, but they also create new challenges. From the perspective of content providers and educational institutions, particularly, cultural and context-related challenges emerge. Even though barriers regarding large-scale adoption of OERs are widely discussed, empirical evidence for determining challenges in relation to particular contexts is still rare. Such context-specific barriers generally can jeopardize the acceptance of OERs and, in particular, social OER environments. We conducted a large-scale (N = 855) cross-European investigation in the school context to determine how teachers and learners percei…
Transformational leadership and absorptive capacity: an analysis of the organisational catalysts for this relationship
2017
ABSTRACTResearch analysing the antecedents of a firm’s absorptive capacity suggests that transformational leadership (TL) is one of its main determinants. However, the few studies focusing on the relationship between these two variables do not explicitly assess why transformational leaders facilitate knowledge acquisition, sharing and retention inside firms. This paper suggests that the reason is that the former contributes to the creation of an organisational context that favours learning processes. We test our research model on a sample of 467 Spanish industrial firms. Findings provide evidence that TL is positively related to the firm’s absorptive capacity and that this relationship is m…
Management by objective enhances innovation behavior: An exploratory study in global management consulting
2018
The goal of this study is to explain the complex effect of management by objective practices on employees' innovative behavior. Instead of considering individual goal orientation and/or formal creativeness-related goal assignment (as in the recent literature), the focus of this paper is on exploring whether the official adoption of management by objective practices may foster employee innovative behavior. Basing on the results of 2 exploratory interviews with 2 senior managers of 2 global consulting companies, we build our conceptual model. We use a goal-based view to this purpose. Then, we test the model by using data collected by surveying 80 consultants employed in 17 different managemen…
Top Management Team Diversity and Ambidexterity: The Contingent Role of Shared Responsibility and CEO Cognitive Trust
2017
Earlier research has suggested that diversity is a double-edged sword when achieving organizational ambidexterity. While it may contribute to the development of new combinations of exploration and exploitation, it may also lead to disagreements and potential conflict within top management teams (TMTs). To improve our understanding of the effectiveness of diversity in ambidextrous organizations, we develop a synergistic perspective on TMT diversity and examine how two types of diversity – functional and age diversity – affect the achievement of organizational ambidexterity. We also identify shared responsibility and CEO cognitive trust as important contingencies that may complement the effec…
Organizational Learning, Innovation and Internationalization: A Complex System Model
2013
Research on organizational learning, innovation and internationalization has traditionally linked these concepts through linear causality, by considering any one of them as the cause of another, an approach that might be considered contradictory and static. This paper aims to clarify these relationships and proposes a dynamic theoretical model that has mutual causality at its core and is based on ideas originating in complexity theory. The final model results from case studies of two clothing sector firms. The authors consider that the three concepts constitute a complex system and can adapt and transcend, as any alteration can take the system to the edge of chaos. Adaptability is fostered …
The Complementary effect of internal learning capacity and absorptive capacity on performance: the mediating role of innovation capacity
2011
Organisations are finding it increasingly more difficult to keep abreast with the pace of change. The continuous rise in the number of business opportunities and the increase in global competition require firms to combine internal and external learning processes to renew and reconfigure existing capabilities and knowledge to enable them to meet environmental demands and to innovate. This study aims to unravel the complex linkage between internal learning capacity and absorptive capacity and at exploring the joint effect of both knowledge generation processes on innovation capacity. This study also proposes innovation capacity as an antecedent of business performance. Using data from 952 ind…
A Matter of Learning: How Human Resources Affect Organizational Performance
2010
Recently, a number of studies have tried to examine the processes that explain the influence of high performance work systems (HPWS) on company performance, in an attempt to understand which variables mediate this relationship and to what extent they do so. The importance of the organizational learning capability (OLC) construct has traditionally been outlined as being essential for a company’s survival and effective performance. Thus, it seems important to establish whether HPWS can be considered an antecedent of OLC, and consequently to confirm whether OLC acts as a mediating variable in the HPWS–company performance linkage. Bearing in mind that HPWS represent a ‘bundle’ of mutually reinf…
How can a learning network support organisational development?
2010
The purpose of this study is to examine the development processes within a network project, The Learning Network of Knowledge Management. The study focuses on the impact of the network on two participating companies. The following research questions were addressed: (a) how did participation in a learning network support professional development of individuals; (b) how did it advance clarifying the mission, collaboration and work roles of teams; (c) how did organisational practices and processes develop as a result of the network project? The data were collected with interviews. The findings showed that the starting points, processes and results differed in two organisations. Both companies …
Managerial practices driving knowledge creation, learning and transfer in translational research: an exploratory case study
2014
Despite its growing popularity in the biomedical literature, the particular phenomenon of translational research management has not been addressed from an organizational and strategic perspective yet. Our study aims to fill this gap by identifying a set of managerial practices that could influence how knowledge is created, amplified and transferred from biomedical research both to clinical practice and the productive sector. As a result of the theoretical review, we have proposed a preliminary model to guide our empirical work. We have developed an exploratory case study to gather organisational information from an outstanding translational research center. The results obtained from the ana…
Levels of Adoption in Organizational Implementation of E-Collaboration Technologies
2008
While the e-collaboration term only dates back a few years, its roots can be traced back at least two decades to the research and development in areas such as groupware, computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), group support systems (GSS), and computer-mediated communication (CMC). As defined by Kock (2005), the e-collaboration term can be seen to encompass a wide range of technologies supporting collaboration among indivduals engaged in a common task. In this article, the e-collaboration term thus incorporates previous research and practice within the areas mentioned above. The term organizational implementation is used to denote the process of introducing the technology in an organizat…