Intellectual capital and performance improvement in healthcare. Opening the black box

Ageing and recession are scaring health policy makers worldwide in terms of sustainability of healthcare expenditure over the next decade. Since healthcare is heavily labour-intensive, only a radical change of healthcare professionals’ behaviour can boost productivity over time. During the last decades, a number of researchers started to investigate how to improve performance of healthcare organisations and deliver more for less. Many of them argumented that healthcare organisations are knowledge-intensive organisations and thus improved knowledge assets dynamics could enable performance improvement (e.g. Hansen, 1999). Despite this interest, the present understanding of the modalities by which intellectual capital enables performance improvement in healthcare organisations is still “a black box”. This paper aims to shed first light on how knowledge assets are a source of performance improvement in healthcare organisations. In particular, this linkage has been investigated through knowledge sharing behaviours among health practitioners.