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As capital searches for new markets, greater efficiencies and competitive advantage, time, space and the boundaries of a firm become strategic enablers rather than operational hindrances. The mobilization and leveraging of knowledge resources to create ideal solutions require building networks of professions who are motivated, empowered and linked to each other. These experts can be at their home, offices, or in other companies in other countries (Jackson & Klobas, 2005). As a result, in the past few years, the “virtualization” of organizations was a common response to these changes. These new kinds of organizational structures namely virtual organizations (VOs) have different inherent natures comparing to traditional ones which connect geographically dispersed units and groups by using communication networks. These structures tent to be increased in the recent years, primarily due to the need for specialized knowledge and expertise, globalization, and employee preferences (Boutellier et al., 1998; Pollalis & Dimitriou, 2008). The key to such organizations is their responsiveness, flexibility, ability to configure knowledge and capital assets based upon emergent market needs, and their transience (Jackson & Klobas, 2005). Knowledge-based assets are now widely considered as one of the most valuable resources of any organization and appear to be necessities for organizational effectiveness in the new century. Performance and profitability differences among organizations can largely be attributed to asymmetries in applying knowledge-based assets to amplify organizations’ existing advantages. Several scholars emphasize on the role of KM on the organizations performance (Choi & Lee, 2003; Kalling, 2003; López-Nicolás & Meroño-Cerdán; Sohrabi et al., 2010; Vaccaro et al., 2010; Yang, 2010; Yim et al., 2004; Yu et al., 2007) and it is demonstrated that knowledge management performance (KMP) has meaningful effects on corporate performance that directly links to company profit (Wu, 2007) which implies the high importance of KM activities in organizations.
It is believed that moving more towards virtual structures, generally correspond to worse KMP as a probable results of the tyranny of distance, non face-to-face communication, communication dynamics, willingness of a member to share knowledge with other members, project management, and cultural issue (Alavi & Tiwana, 2002; Chiu et al., 2006; Kayworth & Leidner, 2000; Kayworth & Leidner, 2002; Savaneviciene & Duoba, 2004) which means that greater virtuality might be a challenge to KMP. Now this question arises that how an organization move to the virtual structures without facing crucial challenges in its KMP or which enabling capabilities a VO should has to boost its KMP, which also illustrates the importance of KM studies in virtual environments. Generally, regarding our analysis, there is dearth of studies which investigate the influence of different contingent factors on the KMP. One of the most related research works is done by Ho (2009) in which he has studied the influence of strategy and leadership, organizational culture, organizational incentive system and information technology as KM enablers on KMP. Chin et al. (2010) have explored the influence of eight KM enabling factors including K-user orientation, KM leadership, customer and knowledge supplier relationships, KM strategy planning, knowledge-centric and continuous learning culture, KM system infrastructure, KM personnel focus, and finally knowledge process management on KMP. Another study, investigated how the prevalent identifiers of a firm’s organizational structure including formalization, complexity, and centralization have any significant effect on knowledge performance (Pertusa-Ortega et al., 2010). Chen and Huang examined the influence of innovative and cooperative climate, social interaction, and organizational structure on KM (Chen & Huang, 2007).