The Comparison of Knowledge Management Practices between Public and Private Organizations: An Exploratory Study
Open Access
- Author:
- Park, Sung Chul
- Graduate Program:
- Public Administration
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- March 06, 2007
- Committee Members:
- Frances T. Munzenrider, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Jeremy Plant, Committee Member
James Truman Ziegenfuss Jr., Committee Member
Parag C Pendharkar, Committee Member
Steven Ames Peterson, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Private organization
Public Organization
Knowledge Management - Abstract:
- Knowledge management (KM) is on its way to becoming an integral business function (Grover and Davenport, 2001) and a new aspect of management for many organizations (Ponzi and Koenig, 2002). Although it can be argued that public sector organizations increasingly face similar pressures as the pressures on the private sector, public sector organizations, partly because of their public ownership and limited competition, may not pursue KM as strongly and effectively as private sector organizations. It seems, therefore, reasonable to expect that there will be differences in understanding, best practice, and performance indicators between the two sectors and how they impact drivers for KM activity. There are differences in how to create value from effectively managing knowledge in the private and public sector contexts, and that these differences will be reflected in KM strategy practice. The purpose of this study is to test empirically the basic KM argument that KM in public organizations differs from that carried out in private organization. In the literature review, the key dimensions of KM are described (chapter 2). This includes arguments about ‘what knowledge is’ (definition, features, types, and perspective of knowledge), and ‘what knowledge management is’ (definition, principles, process, and implementation of knowledge management). Moreover, I explained current situation that KM in public organizations is still underrated even thought KM is so important to public organizations. As needed for the purpose of research, I reviewed general arguments about similarities or differences between public and private organization. Lastly, in the literature review, I introduced the ‘management in the 1990s research program by MIT’ as one part of the research model. In Chapter 3, the methodology for this study is presented. Research model and the hypotheses were developed based on Hansen, Nohria, and Tierney’s model (1999) and MIT90s Framework (Scott Morton, 1991). The processes of measurement such as variables operationalization, methods of data collection, units of analysis, and sample are presented. Chapter 4 covers the analysis and the findings from the survey. In here, first, I analyzed the characteristics of survey respondents according to position, age, gender and education. Second, I tested the hypotheses which were developed to compare KM in both the private and the public sector. Most hypotheses are not supported. Even though the results are contrary to my hypotheses, I found significant differences between public and private organization in some aspects of KM. In knowledge management process, the private organization focuses more on all knowledge processes stages (the storage and retrieval, transfer and sharing, and application of knowledge) than the public organization. Moreover, the result of the test for the degree of codification hypothesis shows that the private organization follows more codification knowledge strategies than personalization knowledge strategies. The means of private organization for the rest of all aspects which are related to codification strategy is significantly higher than those of public organization. Third, factor analysis is applied to identify small number of factors that summarize observed correlations among codification and personalization variables. Fourth, the relationship between the codification and personalization dimension is tested with correlation analysis. The major implication of this is that effective organizations tend to emphasize to a similar degree both codification and personalization knowledge management strategies. Chapter 5 presents the conclusions for this study. It is divided into five sections. In first section, an overview of the purpose of the study and the summary of research are presented. The second section covers the suggestions for KM to public organizations. The third section discusses the implication and contributions of this study. The fourth section discusses the possible future research. The final section presents the limitations of this study.