The Effect of Knowledge Economy and Internal Marketing on Job Satisfaction in Taiwan’s IT Industry

Although the successful experience of science parks has promoted the industrial, technological, and economic developments in Taiwan, it is indeed a fact that the high-tech industries have been serving as a tool for foreign industries. Therefore, it is necessary to improve the competence of the domestic high-tech industries. In addition, due to high-tech industries’ characteristics of short life-span and innovation emphasis, high-tech enterprises have to pay attention to the issues relevant to internal marketing and knowledge management. Moreover, at present, a lot of countries all over the world regard information technology and biotechnology as the top cutting-edge technologies leading human progress and developments; in Taiwan, information technology is also seen as the most important high-tech industry. Consequently, taking the information technology, or IT, industry in the science parks in Taiwan as the research object, this study investigates the correlation between internal marketing and knowledge management. First of all, in-depth interviews with high-ranking executives from the IT industry were conducted in this study to understand the present situation of the promotion of internal marketing and knowledge management in the enterprises. Secondly, relevant literature was consulted to develop scales for internal marketing, job satisfaction, and knowledge sharing, and relevant scholars and experts, including executives and employees, were invited to amend the scale items in order to ensure the feasibility of the scales. Finally, employees were surveyed by questionnaires to verify the conceptual framework of this study and the feasibility of each hypothesis. In this study, employee questionnaires were delivered to 150 companies willing to cooperate. Totally, 2000 employee questionnaires were delivered in succession from October, 2008 to the end of February, 2009, in which 920 questionnaires in total were retrieved, and 812 of them were valid. Through Correlation Analysis and LISREL, it is found that internal marketing and job satisfaction are significantly, positively correlated, and so are job satisfaction and knowledge sharing. In particular, job satisfaction and colleague relation, one of its dimensions, are the most correlated to network sharing.