The Role of Intellectual Capital in the Performance of Public Library Staff in the West Azarbaijan

To identify the role of the components of intellectual capital (human, structural and relational) in the performance of employees of the public libraries of the Western Azarbaijan Province in Iran.

The current research is an applied study in terms of purpose and a descriptive-correlational study in terms of the data collection and analysis method. The statistical population of the research consists of 199 staff of the West Azarbaijan Province's public libraries. To collect data, the Bontis (1998) standard questionnaires on intellectual capital management and Hersey and Blanchard's questionnaire (1992) on employee performance were used with a 5-point Likert scale which contains items such as "knowledge and skills", "perception or imagination of role" and "organizational support". Normality of the data was established at the confidence level of %95 by the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. The data obtained were analyzed by using descriptive and inferential methods operated by SPSS software.

The results of linear regression analysis showed that human capital and structural capital could account for 6 percent of the employee performance variable, but was found the changes in the employee performance were not significantly associated with the changes in the relational capital. The results also indicate that the efficiency and effectiveness of the public libraries in Western Azarbaijan Province increase by paying more attention to the human and structure capitals and eliminating the barriers to improve the relational (i.e. customer) capital.

 The findings showed that attention to the important role of intellectual capital in managerial, technical, social and economic development in public libraries can be decisive. Furthermore, intellectual capital enables the development of inovation in information technology and digital media in libraries and also enables the better service to members.