Past research has not adequately addressed the question as to which amongst the universalistic, complementarity, or contingency perspectives offers the best explanation for empirical observations of the link between KM and performance. Our study addressed this gap by comparing the three perspectives using data collected from a sample of hospitality service providers. We found support for the complementarity perspective when customer service was the dependent variable. However, our results do not rule out the contingency perspective, which was also strongly supported as the links between KM and performance were found to be contingent on the business strategy of the firm. Specifically, we have shown that codification based approaches are more strongly related to performance for hospitality providers competing on cost, whilst a human capital focus is more strongly related to performance for providers competing on quality. We also found that the performance outcome of interest is an important consideration when testing the impacts of KM. Moreover, we have shown that it is important for researchers to explicitly acknowledge the theoretical perspective underpinning their examination of KM and that researchers need to ensure correspondence between empirical tests and the underpinning logic of the selected perspective.