Human Resource Management and Knowledge Management: Revisiting Challenges of Integration

Abstract

Organisations are facing ever-increasing challenges, brought on by marketplace pressures or the nature of the workplace. Many organisations are now looking to knowledge management (KM) to address these challenges. Such initiatives are often started with the development of a knowledge management strategy. To be successful, a KM strategy must do more than just outline high level goals such as ‘become a knowledge-enabled organisation’. Instead, the strategy must identify the key needs and issues within the organisation, and provide a framework for addressing these. The objective of this paper is to study how human resources management (HRM) practices and employees' knowledge influence the development of strategies and, by extension, a firm's performance. The paper has also identified various studies which have tried to portray the importance of HR practices in strategy building, giving emphasis on knowledge creation and steps of integration of both.