**2. Conceptual background and hypotheses**

All successful organizations create and use knowledge as a fundamental tool for interacting with their environments, absorbing information, making informed decisions, and carrying out actions based on the combination of this knowledge and organizational experiences, values, and rules [1, 12, 17]. All of these are activities that make up the knowledge generation process in organizations [18]. The present study posits that knowledge generation requires individual skills and organizational factors that enable external acquisition and internal creation of knowledge.
