Relationship Between Knowledge Management and SME's Performance in Mexico

At the moment, the area of Knowledge Management has been considered in the literature on business management as a new discipline with an important contribution to the development and the implementation of business strategies in organizations. At the same time, companies, independently of their size, have considered and adopted knowledge management as an additional strategy to improve operations and revamp its profitability. These companies have obtained important benefits, among them, major levels of general performance. However, even though there are many studies regarding those Knowledge Management studies, describing its impacts and factors to improve companies' performance, nowadays these approaches have demonstrated an evolution of such elements and performance benefits in organizations. Therefore there is a need of empirical evidence about the benefits from Knowledge Management initiatives and consolidated implementations onto the organizations' performance. In other words, such benefits should not be only investigated based on financial terms but on a broader sense that allows focusing on the accomplishment of today pursued 'total customer satisfaction' in businesses. Moreover, this kind of research needs to be carried out in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and not only in global enterprises located in well-developed countries, like the case of Mexico country. This research presents then a study with the objective to measure the impacts of Knowledge Management through four main dimensions to SMEs performance, workers training, knowledge management policies and strategies, acquisition of external knowledge and organizational culture. In this research a structural equation modeling (SEM) has been applied using EQS (R) in order to validate the established hypotheses. This is by using a sample of 124 companies. Thus, this research presents the relationship between Knowledge Management and SME's performance, in Aguascalientes, one of the most industrial states in the country of Mexico, which is describing a significant positive relationship between these elements.