CORRELATIONS BETWEEN KNOWLEDGE RISKS AND KNOWLEDGE VULNERABILITIES ALONG KNOWLEDGE PROCESSES

Abstract

This research is a continuation of a study conducted in 2023 on the subject of knowledge vulnerabilities and risks in knowledge processes, within private companies. The initial study has been presented at an international conference and aimed to put forward measuring scales for the concepts of “knowledge vulnerabilities” and “knowledge risks”, using a new ontology developed by Brătianu et al. (2022) in order to develop an instrument for measuring both knowledge risks and knowledge vulnerabilities. The present study aims to analyze the relationships that we found between the components of a latent variable that we named “types of knowledge vulnerabilities” and the components of another latent variable, namely “types of knowledge risks”. This paper uses the components that were identified for types of knowledge vulnerabilities and for types of knowledge risks in the previous study, based on a sample of 117 valid questionnaires, the respondents being managers and employees (non-managers) from private companies from various fields of activity. The main findings of this study show that vulnerabilities related to knowledge loss and knowledge use present moderate positive and statistically significant correlations with all the knowledge risks components and that vulnerabilities related to emotional and spiritual knowledge dynamics presents a strong positive correlation with the risks with a similar name.