Intellectual Capital Management in SMEs and the Management of Organizational Knowledge Capabilities: An Empirical Analysis

Abstract

Knowledge management is a complex concept of difficult implementation in the organizations and only possible to understand from a socio-technical point of view, where the human component establishes a relation of synergy with technological and cultural elements that allow him to extend their capabilities. The proposed model is based on a cause-effect relation, as the result of the influence of IT/IS presence, organizational culture and human capital in organizational knowledge management, within the framework of a maturity model. The investigation was developed on a group of Latin American SMEs from the industrial and manufacturing sector, using a Partial Least Squares (PLS) approach and k-means clustering for statistical analysis. Structural validity of the model was verified and reliability consistency, stability, and prediction ability were demonstrated. The analysis shows that Latin American SMEs have not found yet the balance that allows them to efficiently take advantage of the installed technology and the capacity of their human resources to operate its intellectual capital. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.