An integrated approach to assessing an organization’s knowledge potential

Abstract

In the context of globalization and transformations, efficient knowledge potential assessment and management is a powerful way for increasing the performance of organizations. Knowledge potential is defined as a whole of organization’s resources and market opportunities, and its complex assessment and efficient management create preconditions for satisfying changing customers’ needs, creating value and uniqueness in the marketplace. Most researchers emphasize that the crucial components of the organization’s knowledge potential should be integrated and balanced in the assessment of knowledge management since in the complexity and uncertainty of knowledge management environment it is difficult to forecast and anticipate the results the organization is trying to achieve. As a consequence of this, the approaches and methods of the assessment of the factors that influence the external and internal knowledge potential are regarded as controversial in the scientific literature and practice. Different approaches that analyse the aspects of knowledge potential assessment interpret and evaluate the organization’s knowledge potential differently. In this research, these problems are analysed by examining and integrating contemporary management approaches and theories, different attitudes of researchers toward external and internal factors that influence knowledge potential, and their assessment aspects. The aim of this research is to present the peculiarities of the organization’s knowledge potential assessment in the context of transformations and a theoretical framework of the influence of knowledge potential on the organization’s performance. To conduct the research, the analysis of scientific literature, systematic analysis, and methods of synthesis were applied, and the results of the empirical research conducted by the authors (Raudeliuniene, 2017; Raudeliuniene et al., 2018) were integrated. The theoretical framework of the influence of knowledge potential on the organizational performance creates preconditions and research development guidelines for assessing factors impacting the performance of knowledge management and the organization itself.