Knowledge management strategic alignment in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries

Organizations today should actively incorporate knowledge strategy (KS) into their Business Strategy (BS) as knowledge has been recognized as a strategic element in the performance of the organization. Hence, the current research hypothesis that the alignment between BS and KS (KMBS-SA) has a positive effect on the organizational performance. In an attempt to explore the KMBS-KA, an operational model is proposed based on the prior studies in the strategic alignment. The complexity of the research model necessities the illustration of two different conceptualizations for the model to hypothesize the different relationships between KS and BS. The first conceptualization investigates the contribution of KMBS-SA on the organizational performance. The second conceptualization exhibits the different alignments between various profiles of KS and various types of BS. Moreover, using both conceptualizations, the role of KS as a moderator in the contribution of the BS on the organizational performance was examined. BS types were viewed in terms of Miles and Snow's (1978) typology of Defenders, Analyzers and Prospectors. Two KS strategies include: Aggressive Knowledge Strategy (AKS) and Conservative Knowledge Strategy (CKS) were selected to examine KMBS-SA. This model was empirically validated through a survey of 106 banks selected from the six Gulf countries (Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, and Oman). With respect to the perspective of alignment, the moderation approach was chosen. The overall finding of the research demonstrated that there is a strong association between KS and BS and that KMBS-SA clearly influenced the organizational performance. Thus, KMBS-SA is important to the organizational effectiveness of the GCC banks. Moreover, the result showed that only the alignment between prospector strategic activities and AKS profile of KS and the alignment between business strategic type of analyzer with AKS and CKS profiles of KS have a positive effect on the organizational performance. These results indicate that GCC bank should not totally ignore any of the six knowledge strategic choices. Thus, these banks should establish a baseline of KS support for all aspects of BS, and then move from there to add more KS support to those business strategic dimensions that are most important.