The Influence of Social Capital on Knowledge Management Maturity of Nonprofit Organizations - Predictive Modelling Based on a Multilevel Analysis

Abstract

Nonprofit, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are important development actors that operate in ecosystems of multi and cross-sector stakeholders in order to reach the most vulnerable social groups of people. Having this in mind, our goal was to explore to what extent their social capital influences their knowledge in order to propose a model that could optimize their knowledge management maturity through social resources embedded into their structure. Therefore, we focused on NGOs from the European Union and the Western Balkans operating in the international development and cooperation sector. We first conducted a survey among 215 NGOs and then cross-checked the received data through desk research and in-depth interviews. We utilized collected structured data and devised a binary classification model capable of discriminating high level from the low level of knowledge management maturity in NGOs, and multi-class classification model for estimating the actual category of knowledge management maturity which can simulate the real connection among social capital and existing knowledge management maturity. Our findings provide valuable data to the NGO management, regardless of where the NGO comes from, of the number of employees it has, and the number of projects it runs. The mathematical models based on neural networks used in this paper show with high accuracy what the knowledge management maturity level (for each output) is in case there exists prior information about social capital (inputs).