The Research On Mediating Effect Of Knowledge Management Capabilities Between It Capabilities And Organizational Performances

The 21st century is absolutely a century of knowledge. As a very important resource, it performs as the key of the competitiveness event the destiny of a company. In this Knowledge Economy Time, companies must have the abilities that can achieve their economical values by utilizing their knowledge resource. At the same time, accompanied with the rapid development of Information Technology (IT), more and more companies place their hopes of updating their running efficiency on IT. Though it is general acceptance that IT can improve the competitiveness, and the companies invest more and more money in IT, but the results seem not satisfactory. Base on view of organizational capabilities, this article discussed about the construct of IT capabilities and knowledge management capabilities and mechanism for effects of IT capabilities on organizational performances. The purpose of this study was try to expose how can make an IT investigation success, and giving theoretical direction for the companies.First, we did a lot of Literature Review, and summarized the key study concepts, defined the study objects, theoretical principle, concluded the mechanism of the study objects. And then we raised a conceptual model that knowledge capabilities performing as a mediator variable between IT capabilities and organizational performances. Finally, base on the theoretical analysis, we constructed an empirical research model, hypotheses, designed the research project, took interview or questionnaire on 122 companies, analyzed the data, and verified the hypotheses.After investigation and analysis, there come to some important conclusions as following:1) Under Chinese background, the IT capability consists of three components, the physical IT infrastructure components, the human IT resources, and the intangible IT-enabled resources. And the same time, we also validated that, under the Chinese background, the knowledge management capability consists of four components, acquisition process, convert process, application process, and protection process; 2) Verify that number of employees and age two control variables do little effect on IT capabilities, knowledge capabilities and organizational performances; 3) IT capability has a positive effect on knowledge capability, since the IT human resource take positive effects on knowledge acquisition, convert and application process, and the intangible IT-enabled resource takes positive effect on knowledge application process; 4) Knowledge management capability has a positive effect on organizational performance, since knowledge acquisition process has positive effect on the short-term performance, while knowledge application process does positive effect on long-run performance; 5) Knowledge capability, performing as mediator variable, does positive effect between IT capabilities and organizational performances. IT capability scarcely does effect on short-term performances, and only has positive effect on long-term performances, which can be interpreted as the intangible IT-enabled resources taking positive effect on long-term performances through the knowledge management capabilities.