Incentives
are offered for both good questions and answers as rated by the employees, and filters
based on employee ratings of knowledge populate the SKB. In the initial stages, the
firm expects the SKB knowledge components to be used regardless of the rating
levels; possibly because of the “newness” of the initiative, the perceived usefulness is
high. Management foresees that as the ratings-based incentive system stabilizes, however,
employees will become more discerning between “high” and “low” quality of
knowledge. In a similar vein, our analysis shows that knowledge content quality does
not significantly affect perceived usefulness. We should interpret this result very carefully,
however. Perhaps as an organization matures in its KM pursuits and the size of
its knowledge base increases, it should invest in improving the quality of knowledge
content and the relevance of the retrieved knowledge.