Knowledge-sharing dilemmas

Abstract

The exchange of information among organizational employees is a vital component of the knowledge-management process. Modem information and telecommunication technology is available to support such exchanges across time and distance barriers. However, organizations investing in this type of technology often face difficulties in encouraging their employees to use the system to share their ideas. This paper elaborates on previous research, suggesting that sharing personal insights with one's co-workers may carry a cost for some individuals which may yield, at the aggregate level, a co-operation dilemma, similar to a public-good dilemma. A review of the research on different types of public-good dilemmas provides some indications of the specific interventions that may help organizations encourage the kind of social dynamics that will increase overall knowledge sharing. These interventions can be classified into three categories: interventions aimed at restructuring the pay-offs for contributing, those that try to increase efficacy perceptions, and those that make employees' sense of group identity and personal responsibility more salient.

Descriptors: organizational knowledge, knowledge management, co-operation, social dilemmas

Introduction

According to a recent industry survey (KPMG 2000), 81 percent of the leading organizations in Europe and the United States say they have, or are at least considering adopting, some kind of knowledge-management System. The majority of these firms become involved in knowledge-management initiatives with the goal of gaining competitive advantage (79 percent), increasing marketing effectiveness (75 percent), developing a customer focus (72 percent), or improving product innovation (64 percent). Knowledge management is normally used to refer to those managerial practices that are implemented with the main (or sole) objective of creating, storing, disseminating and exploiting organizational knowledge (Davenport et al. 1998). Knowledge-management practices can be of a very diverse nature: they may include information technology (e.g. Anand et al. 1998), organizational structure (Wenger and Snyder 1999; Moore and Birkinshaw 1998), and new human-resource policies (Ulrich 1998). In general, technological solutions tend to prevail. Knowledge-management projects are more likely to be led by the IT department (22 percent) than by human resources (5 percent), marketing (16 percent) or operations (4 percent), and are often built around some kind of intranet, shared database, or groupware software that allows people to communicate with one another, share ideas, and engage in discussions (KPMG 2000).

Two factors have most likely contributed to this extraordinary interest in knowledge management. First, there is a growing conviction among company managers, consultants, and scholars that organizational knowledge may constitute a key strategic resource (see Boisot 1998; Spender 1996; or Nanda 1996). Knowledge can be seen as an intangible asset which is unique, path dependent, causally ambiguous, and hard to imitate or substitute. These characteristics make knowledge a potential source of competitive advantage, and, consequently, the logical target of managerial attention. The second factor contributing to the adoption of knowledge-management solutions has to do with the recent developments in information and communication technologies (Boland et al. 1994; Olson et al. 1993; Fowler 2000; Davenport and Prusak 1998). The development and widespread adoption of global networks and communication protocols have not only made it possible, hut also economically feasible, to interconnect employees in large and geograp hically distributed companies, allowing them to exchange documents and virtually any type of multimedia content (Anand et al. 1998). As we will see, the exchange of information among employees constitutes a key component in the creation and management of collective wisdom, and, consequently, the availability of tools that support such exchanges facilitates tremendously the implementation of knowledge-management systems.

Having been a major driving force in the diffusion of knowledge-management ideas, it is fair to say that information technology is pretty much ahead of the game. Only 7 percent of the companies surveyed by KPMG (2000) mentioned technology as a barrier for the successful implementation of knowledge management--a good indication that technology is doing its job. On the contrary, companies often face a number of non-technological problems that jeopardize the potential benefits of investments in knowledge-management systems. For example, employees may not share what they know with other co-workers due to insufficient understanding of the benefits of doing so, or because they somehow cannot manage to integrate such tasks into their everyday duties. Some employees may not have enough time to share their experiences, or to learn how to use the available information systems. Also, some employees may fail to see a personal benefit from sharing knowledge, or they may perceive insufficient support from the company's top management to apply new ideas to their work (KPMG 2000).