INTRODUCTION

In today's digital society, knowledge is considered as a valuable asset with huge strategic value and therefore, organizations find themselves in need for new strategies which will enable their employees to create, save, capture and share experiences¹. One of the knowledge management challenges is knowledge sharing because much knowledge is inserted into organizational processes². The method by which people actually do their jobs is often different from the formal method identified for doing even the routine jobs³. It is also challenging because there are gaps between what people do and what they think they do⁴.

Many organizations are deploying enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to cut costs, standardize operations and leverage common processes across the organization. ERP permits businesses to have a more convergent vision by using a centralized database and integrated software modules^5,6. Consequently, enterprise resource planning system is considered as one of the most important factors for improving the effectiveness of employees and organization as a whole⁷. Also, based on recent literature review by Al-Emran et al.⁸, Acar et al.⁹ and Migdadi and Abu Zaid¹⁰, few researches discuss the relationship between knowledge management process and ERP effectiveness. For this reason, this study takes the initiative to explore the mediating role of user satisfaction between knowledge sharing and ERP effectiveness where the ERP effectiveness is conceptualized in terms of user creativity.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is a strategic mean that assists companies gain a competitive advantage by restructuring business processes, integrating business units and providing organizational employees better access to information on time⁵. Based on literature review by Catherine and Abdurachman¹¹ and Addo-Tenkorang and Helo¹², the effectiveness of ERP system can be defined as contribution of ERP to system users. In this study, the ERP effectiveness is conceptualized as the extent to which the ERP contribute to user creativity¹³.

Knowledge management (KM) is a process where organizations have expressed means in the attempt to identify and archive knowledge resources within the organization that are resulting from the employees of different departments within organization¹⁴. The knowledge creation and management have positive influence on the individual and organizational performance¹⁵. This is indicated in several studies and publications when they confirm the hypothesis that the creation of communities of practice increasing the creation of knowledge, learning processes and professional development^16,17.

In Knowledge management processes Becerra-Fernandez and Sabherwal⁷ indicated that the knowledge processes can be classified into 4 categories, where each process includes 2 sub-processes:

In this study, the concept of knowledge sharing is defined as “The exchange of knowledge between and among individuals and within and among teams, organizational units and organizations¹⁸.

User satisfaction with regard to electronic commerce and web users’ satisfaction, several researchers indicated that web satisfaction is considered as one of the most significant measures for evaluating the effectiveness of electronic commerce system¹⁹. Also, Sugianto and Tojib²⁰ mentioned that the user satisfaction with web portals is considered as an important attitude of the users who interact with web portals. Wang et al.²¹ remarked that the web satisfaction with el-earning can be identified as one of the constructs that could be used for measuring the effectiveness of e-learning system. Few researches focus on the evaluation and concepts of user satisfaction with web based systems and therefore, the studies just concerned with the concept of the user satisfaction as a two dimensional construct or measure including web information satisfaction as well as system satisfaction^22,23.

Cheung and Lee²² mentioned that the web information satisfaction can be defined as the user satisfaction which focuses on the information quality of the Web-based information system.

They also remarked that web system satisfaction can be defined as the user satisfaction which is concerned with the system quality of the web-based information system. In the current study, Lin²⁴ defined the user satisfaction as the assessment result of the evaluation of affective responses and of users’ cognitive towards ERP System, where the actual perceived performance is evaluated based on some comparison standard

This study focused on the mediation effect of satisfaction on the relationship between knowledge sharing and ERP effectiveness in order to explore the reasons behind the relationship.

MATERIAL AND METHODS

Conceptual model of research variables: Figure 1 demonstrates the theoretical model of independent, mediating and dependent variables. The independent variables include knowledge store, knowledge application, knowledge creation and knowledge sharing. The dependent variable is the user creativity while user satisfaction is considered as a mediating variable.

Fig. 1:	Theoretical model of study variables

Research hypothesis: Based on the research objective, the research examines the following hypothesis: “User satisfaction mediates the relationship between knowledge sharing and ERP effectiveness “.

To check the significance of the mediation role of user satisfaction, it is important to check: (1) Significance of the relationship between knowledge sharing and ERP effectiveness before mediation, (2) Significance of the relationship between knowledge sharing and ERP effectiveness after mediation and (3) Applying the Sobel test for ensuring the mediation effect of user satisfaction based on the results of the previous two points.