Abstract:

Nowadays, the constant change of the environment has forced business organizations to face the challenges and to take advantage of the opportunities with the resources they have, but as all of them have similar possibilities to acquire physical resources, a new paradigm of intangible character has emerged in the field of management: knowledge within the frame of knowledge management to maximize their performance.

The development of knowledge management was attained through three approaches: creating new organizational knowledge, that distinguishes Japanese organizations; measuring knowledge, used by European organizations and maximizing the use of information technologies, according to the North American approach. These approximations are getting closer to integrate a universal basis that is moving towards a new era, where European organizations are trying to apply it; American ones have incorporated the human factor to their management, and Japanese ones use it to better their productivity.

Knowledge management is a three stage process: creation, codification and transference of knowledge. Bueno and Mocillo (2002) consider the creation stage as the most promising field. All this supposes organizational changes, most of all in the structure, that tends to be more flexible, to favor the inside flow of knowledge.

The accomplished studies about knowledge in the organizations highlight that it is the only significant resource because the traditional factors of production have become secondary because they are easily obtained. This is how knowledge society emerges, characterized by the constant appearance of new knowledge and by the permanent development of intellectual faculties, where theoretical and tacit knowledge acquire primacy because they allow the performance of the organization.

At the time that the transition from the industrial society to the knowledge society –that has redefined economy and the way of making business in a global world- starts, Mexican government decided to empower the economy of the country from the manufacturing exporting industry, paying special interest to the activities of the manufacturing industry, even though during the last decade, it was observed in the production of the country, an increasing importance of the tertiary sector, a decrease of the primary and the stabilization of the secondary ones.

With the aim of evaluating the impact of the structure and knowledge over the organizational performance, it was designed a non experimental, quantitative, co-relational and cross-sectional research. The data gathering instrument was structured with 22 latent variables whose items were measured with a Likert 5 scale. A census was taken from the directors of the 19 firms from the so called industry of food, beverages and tobacco quoting in the Mexican Stock Exchange.

To use the structural equations method that allows the evaluation of the set of variables a factorial analysis was made, achieving a reduction in the model from 57 items to 23 factors, and later on, the latent variables were used to reduce it even more.

All this led to the conclusion, subject to a deeper analysis, that the structure has an impact over the organizational performance, contrary to knowledge creation, even though it exist a positive relationship between both independent variables.

Keywords:

knowledge management, knowledge creation, organizational structure, organizational performance.