Episode One – Laying the Groundwork
I’m sure most of us have – at some point in our working lives – experienced the difficulties of seeking critical know-how essential for completing an important work assignment or project and not being able to find it readily available, or to find someone within the organization, having the needed know-how and willing/motivated to share it. This is, in fact, a common situation that many organizations work very hard to overcome and achieve successful knowledge management.
In this first of a series of four posts on the subject, we will lay the groundwork for discussing the very important subject of motivating people to share their knowledge for the collective benefit and survival of the organization. As we will see, knowledge sharing within organizations is, in fact, at the core of Knowledge Management.
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So, what is Knowledge Management?
Knowledge Management is “the explicit and systematic management of vital knowledge – and its associated processes of creation, organization, diffusion, use, and exploitation – in pursuit of business objectives” (Skyrme, 2011). As such, it is an essential resource that enables organizations to grow their competencies and improve their performance (Sheng, Chang, Teo, & Lin, 2013).
Why is it so important?
Knowledge management is, in fact, critical to organizations nowadays in the current information age, as their ability to create, adopt, and exchange knowledge, plays a significant role in their long-term organizational performance (Spender, 1998). More than that, knowledge management helps organizations achieve and maintain their competitive advantage (Rahimli, 2012).
What makes it tick?
Within knowledge management, knowledge sharing, in particular, is an essential and critical building block (Du, Ai, & Ren, 2007). Knowledge sharing enables the transformation of individual knowledge into organizational knowledge (Foss, Husted, & Michailova, 2010). It leverages both personal and collective knowledge to achieve an amalgamation of personal knowledge into the collective knowledge of the organization.
Accordingly, knowledge sharing is a significant – if not THE main – success factor of knowledge management. Without knowledge sharing, knowledge management would simply not work. To be more precise, let us break down knowledge sharing itself even further. In fact, knowledge sharing is the combination of knowledge donation and knowledge collection, where knowledge donation is defined as conveying one’s knowledge and intellectual capital to others, and knowledge collection is defined as seeking the acquisition of knowledge from others (Van Den Hooff & De Ridder, 2004).
Therefore, knowledge sharing, and consequently, successful knowledge management, both depend on knowledge donation.
So, how can organizations encourage knowledge donation?
Knowledge donation involves the motivation of individuals within the organization to communicate their knowledge with their colleagues (Razmerita, Kirchner, & Nabeth, 2014). There are many studies, research, and theories that have addressed the topic and knowledge management in general. Equally, there are different approaches, systems, and platforms that different organizations may have implemented or adopted in their attempts to facilitate organizational learning and the management of knowledge within the organization.
In this context, studies have shown that knowledge donation may be facilitated by leveraging enterprise social media platforms within organizations (Razmerita, Kirchner, & Nabeth, 2014). Enterprise social media (ESM) and/or enterprise social networks (ESN) can be defined as the communication and collaboration technological platforms such as Yammer, Zoho Connect, Chatter, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Microsoft SharePoint and the like, that are nowadays being employed by organizations to facilitate communication, collaboration and internal knowledge sharing among individuals and work groups within the organization.
ESM can play a facilitating and enabling role within initiatives to promote knowledge sharing in the context of knowledge management implementations in organizations. Nevertheless, individuals interacting on the ESM of an organization would still need to be somehow motivated to share their knowledge, right? Bear with me as we zoom in further.
Zooming in on the problem
Therefore, we have established that, generally, knowledge sharing is a major challenge in knowledge management, as individuals within organizations often resist sharing their knowledge due to behavioral and environmental aspects, among others (Alavi & Leidner, 1999; Frost, 2014). In fact, researchers have found that one of the main factors leading to knowledge management failures is the lack of knowledge contribution due to stakeholders’ unwillingness to share or donate their knowledge (Frost, 2014, p. 11).
Focusing explicitly on knowledge sharing via ESM platforms in organizations (Ellison, Gibbs, & Weber, 2015; Shaarawy & Abdelghaffar, 2017), studies also show that behavioral factors significantly affect employees’ knowledge sharing motivation (Shaarawy & Abdelghaffar, 2017). Therefore, it is helpful to understand what behavioral factors affect employees’ knowledge sharing or knowledge donating motivations on enterprise social media, to promote the success of knowledge sharing.
Stay tuned…
Now that we have laid the groundwork that will allow us to zoom in further into the critical constructs at the heart of this matter that is so important to organizations nowadays, we are ready to tackle motivation itself…in the next post of this series.
Stay tuned…
References
Alavi, M., & Leidner, D. (1999). Knowledge management systems: issues, challenges, and benefits. Communications of the Association for Information systems, 1(1), 7.
Du, R., Ai, S., & Ren, Y. (2007). Relationship between knowledge sharing and performance: A survey in Xi’an, China. Expert Systems With Applications, 32, 38-46. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.umuc.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edselp&AN=S0957417405003052&site=eds-live&scope=site
Ellison, N. B., Gibbs, J. L., & Weber, M. S. (2015). The use of enterprise social network sites for knowledge sharing in distributed organizations: The role of organizational affordances. American Behavioral Scientist, 59(1), 103-123.
Foss, N. J., Husted, K., & Michailova, S. (2010). Governing knowledge sharing in organizations: Levels of analysis, governance mechanisms, and research directions. Journal of Management studies, 47, 455-482.
Frost, A. (2014). A synthesis of knowledge management failure factors. Recuperado el, 22, 1-22.
Rahimli, A. (2012). Knowledge management and competitive advantage. Information and Knowledge Management, 2, pp. 37-43.
Razmerita, L., Kirchner, K., & Nabeth, T. (2014). Social media in organizations: leveraging personal and collective knowledge processes. Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, 24, 74-93.
Shaarawy, N., & Abdelghaffar, H. (2017). Achieving successful knowledge sharing through enterprise social network collaboration. The Business & Management Review, 8(5), 1-15.
Sheng, M. L., Chang, S.-Y., Teo, T., & Lin, Y.-F. (2013). Knowledge barriers, knowledge transfer, and innovation competitive advantage in healthcare settings. Management Decision. doi:10.1108/00251741311309607
Skyrme, D. (2011). KM Basics. Retrieved from Knowledge Management: http://www.skyrme.com/kmbasics/definition.htm
Spender, J. C. (1998). The geographies of strategic competence: Borrowing from social and educational psychology to sketch an activity and knowledge-based theory of the firm. In A. H. Chandler, The Dynamic Firm. The Role of Technology, Strategy, Organization and Regions. New York: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0198296045.003.0018
Van Den Hooff, B., & De Ridder, J. A. (2004). Knowledge sharing in context: the influence of organizational commitment, communication climate and CMC use on knowledge
Knowledge Management Today 
Knowledge management is definitely instrumental for organizations achieving and maintaining their competitive advantage!
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Indeed, Abdu. One substantial difficulty that knowledge management faces is in the successful merge and consolidation of individual knowledge into organizational knowledge.
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