Social exchange for knowledge exchange.
Year: 2001
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: The factors that motivate people to codify and share knowledge for the benefit of others havebeen identified as a priority area for individual companies (Smith & Farquhar, 2000, p. 27).They represent the most commonly discussed topic amongst practitioners and academics atconferences on knowledge management (KM) (Prusak, 1999, p. 6) and highlight an importantarea for knowledge research (Holsthouse, 1998, p. 277). To some the encouragement ofemployees to contribute knowledge is more important than the issues related its capture,storage and dissemination (see for example Boisot & Griffiths, 1999).While academics may theorise over the relative importance of motivating knowledge sharing,organisations need to find ways to encourage individuals, who have complete discretion overhow they handle their knowledge assets, to use them for the benefit of the firm by sharingwhat they know openly and freely. They want to discourage knowledge hoarding – bothwholesale and partial - and knowledge loss caused by employee departure. The sharing ofinformation and knowledge is important to efforts in social learning. It is argued that withstraightforward access to common resources employees can execute routine tasks quickly;they can aggregate previously disconnected pieces of information to facilitate innovation inworking practices, product design or service delivery; and they can be liberated from the fearof losing important intellectual assets if valued colleagues leave the firm
Author: Hazel Hall
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems and Management
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W94131134