Firms need to balance efficiency gains obtained through exploiting existing knowledge assets with long-term competitive viability achieved through exploring new knowledge resources. Because the use of knowledge management systems (KMSs) continues to expand, understanding how these systems affect exploration and exploitation practices at the individual level is important to advance both knowledge management theory and practice. This study reports the results of a multi-industry survey investigating how psychological climate and KMS access influence solution reuse (exploitation) and solution innovation (exploration) in the context of technical support work. Our results show that KMS access does not directly determine solution innovation or solution reuse. Instead, KMS access strengthens the positive relationship between a climate for innovation and solution innovation and reverses the positive relationship between a climate for autonomy and solution innovation. The implications for knowledge management research and practice are discussed.
Knowledge repositories are commonly used by technical support analysts in call center environments as a way of capturing and reusing solutions to common problems, and are generally expected to improve service quality, reduce costs, and enhance analyst learning. This study investigates why technical support analysts seek out and access knowledge from these repositories, as opposed to more traditional sources of such knowledge—colleagues and manuals. Focusing on the demand for—rather than supply of—knowledge in organizations, our research elaborates the role played by analysts' learning orientation, perceived work demands, and risk aversion in predicting their knowledge sourcing behavior. Our results include several counterintuitive findings that suggest there is not very much learning going on via technical support knowledge repositories. Analysts seem to be focused on finding recipes for solving customers' problems rather than building a better understanding of the products they support. Implications for research and practice highlight the need for more effective technologies to speed searches, the utility of a formal and visible mechanism for validating knowledge, and the inherent tension between efficiency and learning in these environments.