Revealing deeper relationships between knowledge management leadership and organisational performance: a meta-analytic study

Abstract

Many empirical studies have tried to investigate the relationship between knowledge management (KM) leadership and organisational performance; however, the findings of such studies have been inconsistent. In response to this, we apply a meta-analysis technique to systematically assess the existing pool of empirical research results and derive conclusions. We also examine the impacts of contextual moderators, such as national culture, economy, and industry, on the KM leadershiporganisational performance relationships. The findings, stemming from 6,272 research subjects making up 22 studies, demonstrate that KM leadership is positively associated with the overall (financial and non-financial) performance of firms. Specifically, it was found that the KM leadership-non-financial performance relationship is strengthened in collective cultures, developing economies, and the manufacturing industry. This paper is the first meta-analytic study concerning KM leadership and organisational performance, producing new understanding of contextual factors in the KM field.

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“…The next code is an abbreviation of KM elements followed by the name of the speaker. We clustered these elements into different KM element categories based on Liu's ( 2021 ) work because the work of Liu ( 2021 ) extends Heisig's ( 2009 ) classification to a more detailed approach (Figure 1 ).…”

“…Knowledge-based leadership is the capability of leaders to influence others on KM processes and activities (Liu, 2022).…”

“…Technology-oriented factors KM-related information technologies (IT) KM-related IT refer to tools, platforms, and infrastructures developed by IT that are applied to support KM activities in organizations (Liu, 2021).…”

“…Organization-oriented factors Knowledge-based organizational structure A knowledge-based organizational structure refers to an organizational design that facilitates knowledge processes and activities (Liu, 2021).…”

“…and organizations. Up to now, there is still no widely accepted definitions of KM elements in the literature;Liu (2021) outlined a set of definitions for KM elements based on a large number of empirical studies on KM and organizational performance relationships. These definitions are shown in Table1.…”