SOCIAL CAPITAL FEATURES NAVIGATING THE QUALITY OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT PROCESS IN PROJECT-ORIENTED ORGANIZATIONS

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between social capital and quality of knowledge management process through the prerequisites embedded in internal and external social links necessary for knowledge to be successfully collected, transferred and used. The methodology applied in this paper is based on a survey conducted among 215 nonprofit organizations from the European Union and the Western Balkans that implement international development projects. The results reveal that project-oriented organizations are more inclined to links that come internally from individuals and teams with similar relational and nodal features while both internal and external structural and cognitive features represent a field that should be further deployed to enhance the quality of knowledge management process. This paper empirically documents the relationship between social capital and quality of knowledge management process in project-oriented organizations, being a very rare study of that kind in the nonprofit industry and generally the social capital and quality of knowledge management research.

Keywords

• social capital
• knowledge management
• quality
• projects
• nonprofit organizations