نقش توانمندسازی کارکنان به عنوان یک متغیر واسطه بین مدیریت دانش و سیستم های اطلاعاتی بر عملکرد کارکنان The role of employees’ empowerment as an intermediary variable between knowledge management and information systems on employees’ performance

1. Introduction The changing circumstances of the organizations these days; either political, cultural, social, or economical circumstances, are the result of many sequential changes due to the knowledge explosion and information and communication revolution (Hsu and Sabherwal, 2012; Kasasbeh 2015), the increased internal and external competition resulted in more challenges and difficulties for the organizations to keep up with these changes and adopting to them (Sweis et al., 2011; Krylova et al., 2016), all these events forced the organizations to respond to the changes creatively and to find modern and innovative ways and then they became obliged to make basic changes in their management styles; through finding creative individuals and provide the required and suitable tools that help creating new methods and modern work techniques and quick administrative solutions to face these challenges (Mughraj, 2015). The creative individual is considered as a fortune better than the materialistic fortune, and even the investment in developing the human element is one of the most successful investments, in addition to that, the human resource is one of the most important factors that help in the sustainability of the organizations by achieving the sustainable competitive advantage as a result of his creative abilities, skills, and tacit or explicit knowledge (Hawajrh and Al-Mahasneh, 2015; Inkinen, 2016). Thus, the trend of the organizations toward innovation shouldn’t be restricted to introducing the modern tools and techniques, but the management should be convinced that the employees can innovate and create solutions for the problems they face (Mughraj, 2015). Information systems are considered as a main part of the success of the modern organizations in light of competition and quick change and uncertainty, that gave the information systems a very vital role in the success and efficiency of any organization, and in the completion of the administrative tasks efficiently and effectively (O’Brien and Marakas, 2011), it also helps in cooperation and coordination between the members of the organization and between different organizations, this requires efficient design and management of these systems (Gil, 2009). Knowledge management is considered as the most important competitive advantage that the organizations are seeking to acquire and use, this resource is very important for the organizations in light of the huge development in communication and information, thus, the knowledge management became an important power for the success of business, in addition, such knowledge should be integrated in the strategies of the organization in order to respond to the environmental changes (Ababneh and Hatamleh, 2013; Giampaoli et al., 2017). While human interest, management, direction and motivation have become more important than other areas related to money, technology, and organizational structures (Khansharifan et al., 2015), that’s why from the human related subjects emerged the Employees’ Empowerment (EE), as a modern management concept and one of the most promising (Khansharifan et al., 2015).