ABSTRACT The interest of knowledge management for researchers has increased over the past few years. Reciprocal exchange involves the request for knowledge, the need to acquire new ideas and information from employees, but it also involves the willingness of employees to help others in the development of new skills. Knowledge sharing within organizations increases the organization's capabilities to serve customers better through more innovative and higher performing processes. Knowledge sharing is related to internal communication, which is one of the areas of public relations with growing interest and has been widely studied in different disciplines, including management and marketing. Also, leadership plays an important role in creating a cohesive climate and continuous learning. More specifically, supportive leadership reduces relational conflicts within organizations and thus will be positively related to interpersonal helping behaviors. Thus, our research examines the effects of internal communication and supportive leadership on knowledge sharing. In this sense, our research presents a research model where the tacit and explicit dimensions of knowledge management play a mediating role in the relationship of leadership and internal communication with customer orientation. Data were collected from a sample of employees of a company in the logistics sector through a face‐to‐face and self‐administered questionnaire. The proposed research hypotheses were empirically tested through structural equation modelling (PLS‐PM) with a bootstrapping procedure. The hypothesis testing evidenced that internal communication in companies influences the tacit and explicit dimensions of knowledge management. Furthermore, this research found that supportive leadership enhances a learning climate in organizations and thus positively influences knowledge sharing (tacit and explicit). Finally, our research highlights that only the explicit dimension of knowledge management influences customer orientation. Thus, arising from the results of our research, we present the theoretical contributions of this study and suggestions for the dynamics of companies.
Santo et al. (Wed,) studied this question.