The Role of Knowledge and its Management – An Empirical Study in Taiwan’s Life Insurance Companies

[[abstract]]Business in the era of knowledge economy has realized that efficiently capturing the knowledge embedded in their organizations and deploying it into operations and services will create an edge over their competitors. This article explores how the employees in the life insurance industry perceived knowledge management (KM) and their KM activities by initially reviewing the literature on related theoretical background and previous studies to explore the main factors in adopting and applying KM, and then conducting an empirical survey in Taiwan’s life insurance companies. The findings revealed that most of the respondents agreed that KM would improve their job performance in enhancing service quality, saving time and getting more effective at work, and the opinions from senior management played an important role in having KM into place. Nonetheless, there were a majority of the respondents indicated several obstacles in adopting and implementing KM. Finally, managerial suggestions and further research directions are provided