Internet Resources and Organizational Knowledge Creation: Role of Environmental Dynamism

The development of the Internet has provided firms with the ideal opportunity to make up for the knowledge gap for achieving internal knowledge generation (IKG) and external knowledge acquisition (EKA). It is worth exploring how Internet resources can be used to satisfy organizational knowledge needs efficiently to adapt to dynamic environments. Thus, according to the resource-based view, knowledge-based view, and contingency theory, we study the impact of different types of Internet resources on the two modes of knowledge creation (IKG and EKA), as well as the moderating effect of environmental dynamism (ED) on this relationship. The hypothesized relationships were tested using the hierarchical regression analysis method with survey data collected from 399 Chinese firms. We found that Internet relationship resource and Internet human resource can simultaneously facilitate IKG and EKA, while Internet infrastructure resource positively affects IKG but has no significant impact on EKA. Furthermore, ED positively moderates the relationship between Internet relationship resource and IKG and EKA, but negatively moderates the relationship between Internet human resource and EKA.