Editorial maps psychological dynamics across seven knowledge-management studies

An editorial synthesizing seven contributions to a research collection finds that knowledge management is not a psychologically neutral process. Its conventional activities—creating, capturing, sharing, retaining and applying knowledge—depend on people noticing information, encoding it, interpreting it, assigning trust, voicing it and acting upon it. Across studies of individual cognition, interpersonal exchange, team coordination and organizational strategy, the collection presents effective knowledge management as a multilevel cognitive, emotional and social accomplishment. Its scope is a synthesis rather than a new experiment or a single population-based analysis, and the editorial does not claim that the mechanisms are identical in every occupation, culture or technological setting.

The collection begins with the cognitive foundations of knowledge. A review by Chen and colleagues examines evidence concerning cognitive control and memory encoding, showing that control does not have a uniformly beneficial effect. Task switching, interference inhibition and response inhibition can affect what is remembered in different ways. For knowledge management, the editorial draws a direct distinction between information being available and information being encoded, retained and later retrieved. A system can provide access to a record without ensuring that users will attend to it, process it in a meaningful context or preserve it for subsequent use. The contribution therefore frames the design of knowledge-intensive work around the selective character of human attention and memory.

Research by Liu and colleagues extends this cognitive account from an individual mind to the information environment surrounding online emergencies. The study examines how anchoring, representativeness and availability heuristics shape cognitive bias through adaptive expectations and implicit attributions, and it reports meaningful differences across demographic groups. Its relevance to knowledge management lies in the distinction between circulation and sensemaking: information can reach people while the context in which it appears influences what they regard as credible, memorable or actionable. The editorial consequently treats the quality of interpretation as an object of study, not merely the volume of information distributed through digital environments.

The collection then moves from cognition to the emotional and relational conditions of knowledge sharing. Zhang and Xu connect psychological capital with knowledge sharing through emotional intelligence and psychological safety among e-commerce practitioners. The constructs involved include hope, optimism, resilience, self-efficacy, emotional regulation and interpersonal safety, which the editorial describes as resources that help determine whether knowledge is exchanged. These findings are reported as relationships rather than as proof of a universal causal sequence. What they support is a bounded organizational account in which knowledge sharing is associated with personal resources, emotional abilities and a perceived sense of safety within the group.

Bai adds a leadership perspective by examining transformational leadership, employee career growth and knowledge sharing. The reported finding is that transformational leadership supports employee career growth partly through knowledge sharing, while self-efficacy and psychological capital shape the strength of these relationships. The study therefore places knowledge exchange within systems of employee development rather than treating it solely as an information-handling task. Its results support an association among leadership, knowledge sharing and career growth, while the editorial’s broader synthesis interprets the combination as evidence that personal confidence and psychological resources belong alongside leadership behavior in analyses of knowledge-intensive work.

Wu and colleagues examine what happens when individual knowledge must be mobilized under pressure. Among pilots, personal knowledge management capability is positively associated with career resilience, with safety behavior acting as a partial bridge between knowledge capability and resilient functioning. The bridge is described as partial, indicating that the reported relationship between knowledge capability and resilience is not accounted for entirely by safety behavior. The study also reports non-linear findings involving safety climate and work pressure: supportive conditions can strengthen adaptation, but more support or pressure does not always produce steadily better outcomes. Knowledge management is therefore examined as the conversion of individual knowledge into disciplined behavior within an operational climate, rather than as the accumulation of expertise alone.

At the team level, Yang and Suntrayuth use knowledge-creation and dynamic-capability perspectives to examine how knowledge dynamics contribute to team resilience. Their findings identify communicative, leadership, interpretive and analytical capacities as components of that contribution. The editorial emphasizes that knowledge creation by itself is not enough in this framework: teams must also discuss what they know, interpret it, judge its significance and enact it. Resilience is presented as an emergent achievement of collective cognition and coordinated action. The contribution does not amount to a demonstration that every team with the same information will respond identically, but it does identify the group processes through which shared knowledge is associated with resilience.

Wang and colleagues carry the analysis to the organizational level in technology-oriented small and medium-sized enterprises. Their study identifies a learning-resilience pathway through which strategic human resource management supports innovation. Organizational learning builds knowledge, resilience enables adaptation, and together they help convert human-resource practices into innovation. The editorial presents this as a pathway rather than a guarantee that identical policies will yield identical results across firms. A central qualification is the inverted U-shaped role of environmental dynamism: the relationship changes rather than rising indefinitely. When environmental turbulence becomes excessive, established routines and capabilities may no longer be sufficient, making the surrounding context an important part of any explanation of how knowledge becomes useful organizational action.

Across the seven papers, the editorial identifies three converging themes. First, psychological dynamics are not separate antecedents outside knowledge management; they form part of the process by which knowledge is acquired, interpreted, shared and applied. Second, knowledge management is a multilevel process linking cognitive control and personal resources to interpersonal exchange, team sensemaking, resilience, organizational learning and innovation. Third, context matters: task demands, leadership, psychological safety, safety climate, digital information environments, human-resource systems and environmental dynamism can enable or constrain the conversion of knowledge into action. The collection does not establish a single model based on uniform evidence from every setting, nor does it show that each mechanism operates identically across professions, cultures and technologies. Its contribution is instead an integrative editorial account of psychological processes that recur across the seven contributions.

The editorial calls for research that links analytical levels more deliberately and combines self-report evidence with longitudinal, behavioral, neurocognitive and digital-trace methods. Such studies could examine whether the relationships summarized across separate contributions persist over time, appear in observable behavior and transfer across occupations, cultures and technologies. The editorial also identifies artificial intelligence as an important setting for this agenda, while framing it as a future research context rather than reporting an AI experiment in the collection. As AI becomes embedded in knowledge work, the central issue remains what people notice, accept, challenge, share and use. The collection’s final message is that knowledge does not manage itself: between available information and coordinated action sits human cognition, emotion, trust and social interaction. Understanding that interval, the editorial argues, is essential for knowledge management systems intended to be adaptive, resilient and useful.

Subject of Research: Psychological influences on knowledge management across individuals, teams and organizations

Article Title: Editorial: Psychological dynamics in knowledge management: cognitive, emotional, and social influences

Article References: Fong, P. S. W. (2026). Editorial: Psychological dynamics in knowledge management: cognitive, emotional, and social influences. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, Article 1995346. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1995346

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1995346

Keywords: knowledge management, cognitive control, memory encoding, knowledge sharing, psychological safety, emotional intelligence, team resilience, transformational leadership, organizational learning, organizational innovation, Editorial, Psychological