The slow and inefficient environmental performance of universities is drawing the attention of scholars towards behavioural change in employees rather than just relying on technological upgrades. Drawing upon the Ability-Motivation-Opportunity (AMO) theory, the purpose of this study is first to examine the influence of Green Human Resource Management (HRM) practices (green competence building practices, green motivation enhancing practices, and green employee involvement practices) on the organisational citizenship behaviour towards the environment (OCBE) of academic staff and, in turn, its impact on the environmental performance. Second, the mediating impact of OCBE between each of Green HRM practices and environmental performance is assessed. The data were collected from September until November 2017 on two campuses of a renowned public research university in Malaysia. Using quantitative research design, a structured questionnaire was used among the academic staff of the university. Convenience sampling was used to select the respondents from both campuses, and the Partial Least Squares (PLS) modelling technique was used to analyse the data, which comprised 122 respondents. Overall findings showed that three sets of Green HRM practices based on the Ability-Motivation-Opportunity framework had a significant impact on OCBE. Furthermore, OCBE had a significant relationship with environmental performance. For the mediation analysis, the results showed that OCBE exhibited by academic staff acted as a means through which the Green HRM practices of a university can positively influence the environmental performance of a university campus. The originality of this study rests in shedding light on Green HRM practices in the higher education sector and highlighting the critical role of academic staff’s environmentally friendly behaviour for improving the environmental performance of a university.

Introduction

Globally, researchers and environmental policymakers have agreed upon the fact that the reasons for environmental deterioration like resource deficits, increasing pollution and the loss of biodiversity are deep-rooted into human behaviour (Mtutu & Thondhlana, 2016; Renwick et al., 2013). In response to this, many organisations are inclined towards ensuring that their daily operations are less harmful to the environment through the implementation of environmental management systems (EMS) or green initiatives (Fawehinmi et al., in press). Hence, an emerging need exists for understanding and shaping employee behaviour to minimize the negative environmental impacts of their activities in organisations. In response to these concerns, the role of Green Human Resource Management (HRM) in influencing green employee behaviour in the workplace has emerged as a topic of study (Dumont et al., 2016). Green HRM is the inclusion of environment consciousness within the whole HRM process of hiring, training, rewarding and developing a green workforce that understands and values environment-friendly values, practices, and initiatives. Besides, contemporary researchers supporting the role of human resources in environmental performance have concentrated on environment-friendly employee behaviour as a crucial factor in successfully implementing environmental policies at the workplace (Kim et al., 2017).

This article argues that little is known in public relations (PR) about the experience of leadership and, more specifically, the challenges associated with enacting desired leadership behaviours in the work place. The study focusses on the personal experiences of PR leaders and considers how exploring the interplay between a leader and their context enhances understanding of the conditions under which knowledge is enacted, or rather not enacted, in different leadership situations. The discussion is informed by perspectives from organization and leadership studies which highlight the importance of reflexivity to leadership learning. In addition to applying a reflexive lens to leadership practice in public relations, the study addresses a lack of empirical research focussing on the situated experiences of PR leaders. It considers the reflexive potential of a programme of interviews with PR practitioners providing examples to illustrate the role this form of research can play in leadership studies. The context investigated concerns the work place experiences of senior PR executives who claim to be ‘empowering leaders’. The discussion of the findings focuses on how organizational power relations distort the practitioners’ espoused leadership values and engages in a process of problematization designed to challenge the uncritical promotion of normative and decontextualised approaches to leadership. The article highlights the benefits of a reflexive orientation to PR leadership research and pedagogy, while calling for the promotion of a particular form of contextual intelligence to help practitioners confront the organizational conditions which specifically impact on their ability to lead others.

Introduction

In an article about leadership in this journal more than 30 years ago, Thayer (1986) appropriated a Spanish proverb to make the point that discussing or reading about leadership is not the same as doing it. The proverb he uses warns theatrically that to talk of bulls is not the same as being in the bullring. Four decades on from Thayer’s evocation of the bullring we still know little in public relations (PR) about the experiences practitioners have of leading others and, more specifically, the challenges associated with enacting desired leadership behaviours in the work place. This oversight is not surprising for while there has been a recent upsurge in research, leadership in PR remains an under-developed area of inquiry despite its importance to the impact, development and reputation of the profession (Berger, 2013; McKie & Willis, 2015; Meng, 2014; Petersone & Erzikova, 2016). This article’s interest in the personal experiences of practitioners seeking to enact desired leadership behaviours, in addition to contributing to a nascent area of public relations scholarship, further advances knowledge by connecting PR to relevant research from outside of the field. The study considers how exploring the interplay between a leader and their context enhances understanding of the conditions under which knowledge is enacted, or rather not enacted, in a specific leadership context. In doing so, the discussion introduces perspectives from organization and leadership studies which highlight the importance of reflexivity to leadership learning (Cunliffe & Easterby-Smith, 2004; Cunliffe, 2002).

Abstract

A synthesis of existing Industry 4.0 literature depicts that knowledge management and decision making strategies are crucial factors for organizations. This article highlights the need and develops a framework for knowledge management and decision-making style by reviewing existing management literature. This research proposes a framework that supports the relationship between knowledge management enabling factors (i.e., organizational member’s collaboration, T-shaped skills, learning and IT-support) and organizational performance, and the mediating effect of knowledge creation process. The article also propose that decision-making style (i.e., intuitive and/or rational) will moderate the relationship between knowledge creation process and organizational performance. A set of propositions that represent an empirically-driven research agenda, and also describe the relationships between the focal variables are presented to enhance audience’s understanding within a business context.

Introduction

Managers are saddled with the responsibility of leading their organizations to achieve objectives and stated goals. This does not only require versatility and prowess, but more adequate knowledge management with excellent decision-making. The term “knowledge” has being viewed and defined from differing perspectives. According to Davenport and Prusak (1998), knowledge is a blend of contextual information, framed experience, expert’s experience and value that results in innovation and pristine experience. Knowledge is also regarded as organizational culture, skills, reputation, intuition, and codified theory that influences human behavior and thought (Hall & Andriani, 2003).

Nonaka (1991) classified knowledge into “Tacit” and “Explicit” knowledge based on the ease for coding and transferring the available knowledge. Explicit knowledge is easily transferable and coded, while tacit knowledge is rooted deeply into the system within the organization. In its passive form, knowledge is useless, however, when activated through creative processes for application, replenishing and sharing, it may lead to outstanding performance. Therein, knowledge management is the process of activating passive knowledge for the benefits of organizations and to gain competitive edge (Duffy, 2000; Van Buren, 1999).

Organizational management main objective is to ensure effective and efficient use of its diverse resources such as labor, capital, materials, energy and information in their quest to achieve competitiveness as well as to increase productivity. Iran’s organizations objectives are not an exception as they similarly strive to maintain high productivity through management innovations and dissemination of policies. In today’s rapid technological change, companies are in constant struggle to maintain competitive advantage through market differentiation by providing superior products and services. Among various methods, the management in organizations is increasing their focus on employees’ know-how, past experiences and expertise in their quest to excel in achieving their goal. Additionally, improving the communication among employees as well as changing the organization’s culture to a share-what-you– know is integral in todays’ organizations. Without any doubt, Knowledge has become an integral asset for production, next to labor, land and capital [1]. Even though some forms of intellectual capital are transferable, internal/personal knowledge is not easily articulated, captured, retained, disseminated and reused. Accordingly, the knowledge anchored in employees’ minds can get lost if they decide to leave the organization [2]. The basis of Knowledge management is to fine strategy that the right knowledge with the right shape put in the right people. [3] Current research demonstrates organizational success as a by-product of the critical success factors of implementing Knowledge management (KM). Indeed, it should be noted that the impact of intangible (knowledge) assets is significant although they are difficult to be conveyed as they are mostly arising from encountering real situations and as a result through real experiences of employees. In today’s competitive world, productivity as a philosophy which is based on improvement strategy forms the most important goal of any organization; therefore, knowledge management promises to create the proper structure and the necessary technological infrastructure in organization and human-driven placement. Inventing new training techniques and methods for teaching manpower to control costs, improve quality and customer satisfaction, is an essential management processes. Owing to the fact that different information technologies and techniques applied in the function of knowledge management reflect various effects in separate processes as well as improving diverse indicators in the organizational efficiency, hence, today’s enterprises require more information and communication in order to reduce costs given the scarcity of current resources, to shorten delivery time, to increase quality and improve productivity.

Social media has been a popular and ubiquitous application of Information Technology (IT) in recent years. Facebook, while not the first social media platform, is certainly among the most dominant as of this writing. Founded in 2004, Facebook currently boasts roughly 1.8 billion users, with nearly 2/3 of those users logging in daily. The company is currently valued at over $350 billion. Of course, Facebook is not the only social media platform available. Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Tencent, and Wechat each have massive user bases and strong business performance. It is difficult to define social media in a way that separates it fully from previous information and communication technologies, such as email and discussion boards (Kane, Alavi, Labianca, and Borgatti, 2014b). Many similarities exist between social media platforms and previous generations of information and communication technologies. For instance, much of the research on online communities (e.g. Butler, 2001; Preece, 2000; Wasko & Faraj, 2005) and on IT-enabled anonymity (e.g., Connolly, Jessup, & Valacich, 1990; Dennis, 1996; Sia, Tan, & Wei, 2002), applies just as readily to social media platforms as it did to email networks, chatrooms, discussion boards, and group decision support systems. Some have suggested that the “reply all” button in email is actually the first social feature in information technology, because it was the first feature that naturally enabled instant group communication (Shirky, 2008). As such, it may be more productive to recognize social media as an evolving set of IT-enabled affordances that allows people to communicate and collaborate using information technology, rather than a distinctive and independent class of technologies. Furthermore, social media platforms are increasingly leveraging a robust infrastructure of other types of technologies – such as cloud computing, mobile devices, analytics, and other emerging technologies – to deepen the communication and collaboration affordances enabled by social media. Much of the value of social media in recent years has come from the addition of new capabilities enabled by this evolving technological infrastructure.

Globalization has created new challenges for businesses to remain competitive. Nowadays, businesses have to face high competition between businesses and run the risk of losing their customers easily because most of them have difficulty in understanding and responding to rapid changing market trends. The growing importance role of knowledge has motivated businesses to move on from other management practices to knowledge management (Cho & Korte, 2014; Tubigi & Alshawi, 2015). Knowledge management is regarded as the capability to manage knowledge such as acquiring knowledge from either internal or external organization, converting it into new strategy or idea, applying and protecting it (Gold, Malhotra, & Segars, 2001). By adding the concept of knowledge management capability into operations, abundance of information of customers can be captured and this can further assist the service industry to improve on their overall service quality and faster service response time (Runar Edvardsson & Kristjan Oskarsson, 2011). Investigating on the relationship between knowledge management capability and organizational performance is essential as the findings can help the businesses to further explore the consequences of knowledge management (Liu & Deng, 2015). Besides, there is a lack of study that investigates the relationship between knowledge management capability and non-financial performance (Cho & Korte, 2014). Moreover, the findings of previous researches are still inconclusive with regards to the knowledge management capability-performance link which, some researchers found that not every dimensions of knowledge management capability is significantly correlated to performance (Mills & Smith, 2011). This study aims to bridge the gaps by examining the relationship between individual dimensions of knowledge management capabilities and a more specified organizat ional performance that includes non-financial performance indicators among SMEs in the service sector of Malaysia.

As an old belief, “knowledge is power” could be replaced by “sharing knowledge is power” in the current information societies in which knowledge-based decisions and activities are of utmost importance (Davenport and Prusak, 1998; Ahmad, 2014; De Angelis, 2016) and organizations are becoming more knowledge intensive (Wong, 2005). As a result, knowledge can now be viewed as a strategic asset for organizations in comparison with tangible elements. In such a subtle state, knowledge management is an attempt to manage knowledge (skills, merits, and insight) of employees and managers which is internal and external as well (Trisnanty and Handayani, 2013; Patil and Kant, 2014). Knowledge management has emerged as an approach to incorporate emerging requirements of the modern organizations (Gold et al., 2001; Chang and Chuang, 2011; Williams, 2015) in which ever-changing capabilities and competitive intelligence are of pressing concerns. Knowledge management efforts typically focus on organizational objectives, such as improved performance, competitive advantage, innovation, the sharing of lessons learned, integration and continuous improvement of the organization in an increasing competitive market (Gupta and Sharma, 2004; Wong, 2005). As an established discipline since 1990s, knowledge management includes courses taught in the fields of business administration, information systems, management, and library and information sciences (Omotayo, 2015). The basic factors required for the creation of a system, organization or structure is called infrastructure. These infrastructures have soft, invisible and physical, visible nature and can be considered as the software of the organizations rather than their hardware (Chang and Chuang, 2011). Knowledge management infrastructure also reflects the long-term foundations for knowledge management. In an organizational context, knowledge management infrastructure includes five major components, including organization culture, organization structure, organization’s information technology infrastructure, common knowledge and physical environment (Becerra-Fernandez and Sabherwal, 2010; Trisnanty and Handayani, 2013).

The development of knowledge network communities has been an aspect of the corporate intranets and knowledge portals, and it has ever since enabled the connection of human resources with corresponding interests, regardless of time and space restrictions. In spite of in the beginning the organizational intranets was known or seen as a simple repository of information and data where employees and stakeholders do not necessarily implied a strong bond among the organizational network community, that has changed with the increased availability of user-generated content mechanisms and with the growth of social networking services, as well the continuous growth of intranet (and web 2.0) management technologies. Corporate intranets (along with the Internet) became the hub of socialization and knowledge sharing; became the logical extension of our human tendencies and learning, that have been tailored our society and our cultures. Those reflected tendencies towards an individualcentered approach whereas group-centered activities, creating context where each individual contributes to the intellectual climate and technological infrastructure of society, rather than the effects of media itself. Organizational learning communities are a phenomena usually built upon multidisciplinary and innovative collaborative stakeholders which grow within the organizational workplaces. The following section describes the knowledge management and engineering approach, including the knowledge elicitation and acquisition techniques and an ontology design methodology. The following sections present the main knowledge management focus of this research: managing intellectual capital in organizations, and a research approach to capture the organizational learning network. The design approach being used to model the organizational network applies conceptual maps and ontologies.

In current dynamic business environment, the competition is getting stiffer and sustainability become an issue. Organizational performance had been key focus in implementing measures to ensure competitiveness and sustainability. Performance is at the core of all activities in organizations as it determines the. organizations’ survival (Wang, Bhanugopan, & Lockhart, 2015). In view of this, organizations have to manage money, energy and time effectively and efficiently to optimize the return on investment. This can be achieved through I-TOP model (Muthuveloo, R. & Teoh, A. P., 2013) through its three dimensions comprised of Technology Infinite Possibilities, Outright Environmental Scanning and People (Human Capital Development). This paper focusesed on the third dimension of I-TOP model called people (Human Capital Development) in order to optimize the organizational performance. The contribution of people towards organizational performance can be classified into two categories namely hardware and software. Hardware and software indicate the skills and knowledge needed to optimize performance respectively. It examines whether knowledge has significant influence on organization performance and how to retain, share and utilize knowledge to enhance organizational performance. As indicated by Kruger & Johnson (2011), it focuses on formulating strategies for knowledge management especially the tacit knowledge which is recognized as main sources of competitive advantage of firms. Fundamentally, people operates at all related functions in an organization and without them, business is basically a null. Hence, this study emphasizes knowledge management of employees as a key business strategy for organizational performance.

این مطالعه تلاشی برای ازمودن تاثیرات فعالیت های منابع انسانی استراتژیک بر نواوری سازمانی و ظرفیت مدیریت دانش شرکت ها می باشد.داده ها از صنایع فعال در کشور ترکیه جمع اوری شد. نتایج حاصل از تحلیل رگرسیون تاکید می کنند که تنها فعالیت های خاص در منابع انسانی استراتژیک، قدرت پیش بینی نواوری سازمانی را دارند. علاوه براین، یک الگوی مشابه بین فعالیت های منابع انسانی استراتژیک و ظرفیت مدیریت دانش شرکت ها مشاهده شد. به طور کلی، یافته های ما اهمیت جبران خدمات، سیستم های اموزشی و ارزیابی عملکرد را به عنوان پیش بینی کننده های متغیرهای وابسته در نظر می گیرند. در پایان مقاله نتیجه گیری و پیشنهادات بیشتر و هم چنین محدودیت ها ارائه شده اشت.

مقدمه:
مجموعه های پویا و غیر پویای کسب وکارامروزی موجب می شود تا شرکت ها به سمت نواوری حرکت کنند. به ویژه، شرکت باید در انواع مختلفی از امور نواوری شرکت نمایند تا مزایای رقابتی خود را افزایش داده و موجب بقای خود در بلند مدت شوند. اکتشاف و بهره برداری انواع نواوری، توجه بسیاری از افراد را در زمینه ی ادبیات جلب کرد. پزوهش قبلی مشخص کرد که نواوری سازمانی به عملکرد شرکت، هدف گذاری استراتژیک شرکت، بهره وری و فرهنگ سازمانی مربوط می شود. علاوه بر مطالعات سطح سازمانی که اکتشاف و بهره برداری را مورد بررسی قرار دادند، مطالعات اخیر تاکید بر سطح تیمی و فردی نواوری را اغاز کرده اند. علی رغم مجموعه ای از این مطالعات و روش های هرمی ارزیابی نواوری، محققان به توافقی رسیده اند که نواور بودن تقریبا با نتایج بهره وری و عملکرد مطلوب برابر است.