What did you expect to happen? Aligning hr practices with knowledge management outcomes

Abstract

HRM practices can be designed to influence not only employees’ creativity, but also an organization’s innovation capabilities and the management of related activities in general. Accordingly, a knowledge management question that ought to be constantly asked is the balance that organizations need to find between the two opposing goals of innovation activities: sharing knowledge between the players involved in innovation on one hand, and preventing vital knowledge from leaking and leaving the same activities on the other hand. This study addresses the questions of how different HRM practices relate to the incidences of both knowledge sharing, and knowledge leaking and leaving. Our findings indicate that different HRM practices lead to different outcomes, which thereby indicates that traditional and process approaches both carry out quite different functions.