Exploring the influencing factors on inertia source of knowledge flow

Knowledge flow is one of the critical subjects of knowledge management (KM); indeed, it's also a challenging task for improving KM performance because the property of knowledge itself is hardly flowing in nature, especially, in an organization with volume and different members. Differ from those management activities with information technology such as ERP; KM involves more interactions among various individuals, groups or parties in an organization, and further extent to the issues about organization and social behavior. Thus, clarify the properties s of organizational knowledge and its related parties and mechanism with the respective combing knowledge flow, social behavior, and IT for exploring the inertia source within an organization may be the efficiency solution for improving KM performance. In this study, we first took the respective of behavior science to collecting related influencing factors of KM in organizations, and propose a model based on cognitive theory for detecting the inertia source of knowledge flow in organizations. Both qualitative and quantitative methods are conducted to process this study; in-depth interviews with 12 experts from different companies were conducted to obtain related themes concerning KM in their own companies, a content analysis was used to analyze the relevant factors in details, and a statistical technique was used to further verify our research findings. The research propositions were also constructed according to the results. It shows that the revised model with five dimensions is suitable to describe KM, and the relevant practices are also discussed.