Knowledge Sharing Behavior of Graduate Students

Active knowledge sharing is considered an important activity in the learning process. However until now, the focus of many studies has been on understanding the impact of information and knowledge sharing on the performance of corporate and public organizations. On the other hand, its implications in the educational arena have been relatively unexplored. The purpose of this study was to investigate perceptions, nature and extent of knowledge sharing among graduate students in Singapore. It also investigated the factors and class activities that would either promote or inhibit knowledge sharing among students. A questionnaire was used for data collection and 183 students from two public universities in Singapore participated in this study. The study revealed that the participants were primarily motivated to share information and knowledge in an attempt to build relationships with their peers and email was the preferred communication channel for this purpose. However, intense competition among the students to outperform their classmates and the lack of depth in relationship were the two most important factors hindering the knowledge sharing activity. The study suggests that academic institutions should review their instruction approaches to make the learning process less competitive which would help improve knowledge sharing among students.

Social Network Structures for Explicit, Tacit and Potential Knowledge

The purpose of this conceptual article is to develop argumentation of the knowledge assets of a firm as consisting of three constructs, to extend the conventional explicit, tacit dichotomy by including potential knowledge. The article highlights the role of knowledge, which has so far not been utilized in value creation. The underlying assumption in the article is that knowledge assets can be thought of as embedded in the relationships between individuals in the firm, rather than possessed by single actors. The concept of potential knowledge is explained with selected social network and knowledge management literature. The findings suggest that the ideal social network structure for explicit knowledge is centralized, for tacit knowledge it is distributed, and for potential knowledge decentralized. Practically, the article provides a framework for understanding the connection between knowledge assets and social network structures, thus helping managers of firms in designing suitable social network structures for different types of knowledge.

A Framework for Managing the Life Cycle of Knowledge in Global Organizations

This chapter describes a framework for managing the life cycle of knowledge in global organizations. The approaches described in this chapter were initially used to successfully build a knowledge dissemination system for the laboratories and facilities that are under the direction of the United States Department of Energy (DOE) (Salisbury & Plass, 2001). The follow-on work to this effort was the development of a collaboration application that fed the dissemination system for the DOE laboratories and facilities. The resulting system managed the life cycle (creation, preservation, dissemination and application) of knowledge for the DOE laboratories and facilities (Salisbury, 2003). While seen as a highly successful system, a significant problem was the difficulty in identifying the right knowledge that needed to get to the right people at the right time. This is also a significant problem for global organizations that need to share their knowledge across international boundaries. What is needed to solve this problem for global organizations is a systemic way that can be applied as an organizational strategy to identify this knowledge, the people that needed it, and the time it should be accessible. This chapter focuses on the use of performance objectives for managing the “right” knowledge in a global organization. In the next section, the background of the projects that inspired the framework is introduced. Next, the framework itself is discussed: the theoretical foundation for the framework, Work Processes, Learning Processes, and Methodologies for managing the life cycle of knowledge in a global organization. (For a full discussion of this approach in book form, see Salisbury, 2009).

Investigating the Impact of Knowledge Management Factors on New Product Development Performance

Knowledge is recognized as an important weapon for new product development (NPD) performance, and many firms are beginning to manage the knowledge detained by their new product development processes. Researchers have investigated knowledge management factors such as enablers, creation processes, and performance. However, very few studies have explored the relationship between these factors in the context of new product development (NPD). To fill this gap, this article develops a research model which applies the knowledge management factors to the NPD context. The model includes five enablers: collaboration, trust, learning, team leadership characteristics, and t-shaped skills with an emphasis on the knowledge creation processes such as socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization. The results confirm the strong support of the research model and the impact of the independent variables (knowledge management enablers) on the dependent variables (knowledge creation and NPD performance). In light of these findings, the implications for both theory and practice are discussed.

A Simulation System for Evaluating Knowledge Management System (KMS) Implementation Strategies in Small to Mid-Size Enterprises (SME)

Companies create and use information and knowledge every day. The problem all companies have is figuring out how to efficiently discover that knowledge, capture it, share it, and use it to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace. This chapter describes a simulation model designed to provide small to mid-sized enterprises (SME) with a means to understand the impact of barriers and value accelerators on the flow of organizational information. The simulation model reports the throughput of information (number of information packets received per day) and its timeliness (average duration until packet arrival) and provides for sensitivity analysis of the parameters describing a strategy. Comparisons among model instantiations allow an organization to determine the appropriate strategy for current and future KMS efforts.

Knowledge Management Toolkit for SMEs

The discipline of knowledge management is no longer emerging in large organizations, but also small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are focusing on finding the right process that will allow them to make advantages of their intellectual capital. Using survey data from 219 small and medium-sized enterprises in Austria and Switzerland, this article illustrates the four key knowledge processes (1) knowledge identification, (2) knowledge acquisition, (3) knowledge distribution, and (4) knowledge preservation for SMEs and also reports the findings of the empirical study designed to allocate cost-efficient software products to each of the four knowledge processes. As a result a knowledge toolkit for SMEs that integrates knowledge processes, methods and software tool for decision support making is given. Finally, the social view of knowledge management to SMEs is discussed, showing that the use of information technology is currently far more important than the integration of a social-cognitive perspective.

A Comprehensive Model for Assessing the Organizational Readiness of Knowledge Management

Nowadays, the key to an organization’s success is the ability to assess its readiness to create and improve the processes underlying its strategy. Realizing the fact that knowledge plays important roles in attaining competitive edge and strategic goals, managers give much emphasis on Knowledge Management (KM). However, implementing knowledge management or knowledge-sharing projects in an organization require significant organizational prerequisites. Lacking proper infrastructures and prerequisites, not only make the knowledge management process unprofitable, but also it might incur harmful effects as well. To decrease such risks, it is proposed to introduce the readiness assessment, in order to gauge a company’s appetite for the work involved in implementing the knowledge management. In this research, critical success factors have been extracted from comprehensive literature reviews and they have been surveyed through a questionnaire, distributed among 130 knowledge management experts. Then, to validate the measurement of the multi-item constructs, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was used. Identifying effective variables and their grouping into related factors, the second questionnaire was employed for readiness assessment of an IT firm working in Iran. The final results were presented with Radar diagrams. Finally, promoting propositions were provided based on the firm’s current status.

Using Agent Based Simulation and Game Theory Analysis to Study Knowledge Flow in Organizations

Knowledge sharing in organizations, especially the impact of sharing freely versus not sharing, was studied using game theoretic analysis and a Netlogo agent-based simulation model. In both analyses, some agents hoarded knowledge while others shared knowledge freely. As expected, sharing was found to greatly increase the overall amount of knowledge within the organization. Unexpectedly, on average, agents who share acquire more knowledge than hoarders. This is in contradiction to the conclusion from the prisoner’s dilemma analysis. This is due to the synergy that develops between groups of agents who are sharing with each other. The density of the agents is important; as the density increases, the probability increases that an agent with a large amount of knowledge to share happens to be organizationally nearby. The implications are that organizations should actively encourage knowledge sharing, and that agent-based simulation is a useful tool for studying this type of organizational phenomena.

Measuring Knowledge Management Outcomes at the Individual Level

Extant literature has mostly focused on defining knowledge management success at an organizational or project level. The literature lacks a framework for measuring knowledge management success at the individual level. From a cultural perspective of knowledge management, individual knowledge, innovation and performance make organizations more productive. This research proposes a model of the interrelationships among individual level knowledge management success measures (outcomes) including conceptual, contextual and operational knowledge, innovation, and performance. The model is tested using a sample of 252 individuals engaged in managerial and professional knowledge work. The results suggest that conceptual knowledge enhances operational and contextual knowledge. Contextual knowledge also improves operational knowledge. Contextual knowledge is the key predictor of innovations that, along with operational knowledge, enhance work performance. The results provide a model (tool) for defining and measuring knowledge management success at the individual level. The implications of this success measurement tool for future empirical studies of organizational culture are discussed.

Cocreating Corporate Knowledge with a Wiki

Wikis have a growing reputation on the open Internet for producing evolving stores of shared knowledge. However, such democratic systems are often treated with suspicion within corporations for management, legal, social, and other reasons. This article describes a field study of a corporate Wiki that has been developed to capture, and make available, organisational knowledge in a large manufacturing company as an initiative of their Knowledge Management (KM) program. As this approach to KM is a controversial and rapidly changing phenomenon, a Q Methodology research approach was selected to uncover employees’ subjective attitudes to the Wiki. Activity Theory was used to provide a deeper interpretation of the findings of the Q-study. The results are enabling the firm to more fully exploit the potential of the Wiki as a ubiquitous tool for successful tacit and explicit knowledge management as more employees are encouraged to participate in a process of cocreating the store of corporate knowledge. The article also demonstrates how meaningful and rigorous research on this new democratic direction of corporate KM should continue.