Linking Knowledge Management and Intellectual Capital: A Study in Portuguese Banks

The ability of an organization to effectively nurture, capture, leverage, and share its knowledge resources become the key that provides an enterprise with its strategic power advantage in the world. When an organization develops its ability to build, access and leverage its knowledge resources it is creating its knowledge advantage. In an era of knowledge economics, Knowledge Management (KM) and Intellectual Capital (IC) have emerged as major issues that managers must deal with, if the organizations want maintain their competitive advantage. The accumulation of IC and KM is closely related. The successful management of IC is linked to the efficiency of KM processes, which, in turn, implies that the successful implementation of KM ensures the growth and renewal of IC in an organization. There are relatively few discussions on the relationship between KM and IC, and even fewer studies on such relationship in the banking industry. For the banking sector, as one of the most knowledge-intensive industries, it is imperative to understand how to use techniques in KM to accumulate IC to cope with an increasingly changing environment. Based on previous studies, this article seeks to explore the links between IC and KM in Portuguese banks, by identifying the IC resources of importance and leveraging these resources through KM capability.