Knowledge Management in Municipalities: What Affects Customer Satisfaction?

Knowledge management in organizations has acquired an increasingly important strategic role in their management. Based on the four-factor explanatory model of knowledge management - knowledge-centred culture, competitive orientation, formal knowledge management practices and informal knowledge management practices -(Pais, 2014), the aim of our study is to analyse how formal and informal knowledge management practices affect customer satisfaction. Two separate surveys were carried out: the KMQ - SF (Pais, 2014) was filled in by 1307 municipal employees and the MSQ-S (Brito, 2010) was answered by 2914 citizens (as users of these municipalities). In order to find out whether the reviews by employees were sufficiently consistent to be taken into account as an organizational indicator (Yammarino & Dansereau, 2011) the AD(M) index of agreement was applied. The results obtained indicated that knowledge management predicts little of the satisfaction felt by customers regarding both dimensions studied (satisfaction with the physical conditions of service provision and with the services themselves). The results also revealed that formal and informal knowledge management practices have negative effects of a non-significant value and low magnitude (Cohen, 1988) in relation to customers' satisfaction with the physical conditions of services and with the services "per se".