Factors Affecting Knowledge Acquisition

Although there is a growing literature on knowledge management, limited attention has been paid to the factors that influence the process of knowledge acquisition. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to bring forward the main elements that may stimulate or inhibit knowledge acquisition at both the individual and organizational level. Knowledge acquisition is mainly affected by a company's absorptive capacity, organizational context and structure, and inter-firm alliances. These may increase the firm's awareness of the external challenges and stimulate inter-organizational interactions. The impact of each of these factors is highly visible in the context of international joint ventures. Still, in this case, another factor interferes, namely cultural specificity.

Knowledge Acquisition and Loss

Metaphorically, the energy conservation law that is applied to all physical systems can be transferred to organizations as the dynamic equilibrium of organizational knowledge. The balance equation for organizational knowledge includes knowledge creation, knowledge acquisition, and knowledge loss. Knowledge acquisition means to bring in organization fluxes of knowledge from the external environment, while knowledge loss means to have fluxes of knowledge crossing the interface toward the external environment. The purpose of this chapter is to present the main issues that are related to knowledge acquisition and knowledge loss for organizations. Knowledge loss became a hot issue in the last decade when the wave of baby boomers reached the retirement age. In the United States and in Europe, ageing of workforce, as well as the downsizing strategies during economic crises, generated many problems due to knowledge loss, which leads to a decreasing capacity for business competition.

Spiritual Knowledge

In this chapter, the author presents the third fundamental component of the triple helix of knowledge: spiritual knowledge. It is an emergent field of research, especially as an integral part of spiritual intelligence and spiritual capital. Spiritual knowledge is about the deep human concerns of our existence, and of our connection with the whole universe. From a more practical perspective, spiritual knowledge is about our values in society and organizations, and how these values influence managerial decision making. Promoting positive values, we realize business performance and affirm corporate social responsibility. Understanding spiritual knowledge becomes this way a key success factor in understanding the essence of the new business in creating value for society and not being trapped in profit maximization. Spiritual leadership incorporates spiritual knowledge and spiritual intelligence and shapes the vision and mission of any organization.

Organizational Learning and the Learning Organization

Organizational learning and learning organization are two constructs based on conceptual metaphors. Organizational learning is a process that occurs across individual, group, and organizational levels through intuiting, interpreting, integrating, and institutionalizing. It is a purposeful process designed and sustained by inspired leadership. It may be an adaptive process based on the single-loop learning or a generative process based on the double-loop learning. The organization that is capable of transforming organizational learning into the engine of knowledge creation aiming at building up a competitive advantage may become a learning organization. Peter Senge developed the theory of the five disciplines that may transform a company into a learning organization, focusing on systems thinking. The purpose of this chapter is to present different views concerning organizational learning and its main characteristics.

Organizational Knowledge

Organizational knowledge is a conceptual construct that reflects the convergence of all individual knowledge fields in an organization. That means all explicit and tacit knowledge fields, or changing the paradigm all cognitive, emotional, and spiritual individual fields of knowledge. The result of this integration process is performed in interactive and iterative modes by organizational integrators. Although there are many debates concerning the building up of organizational knowledge from the individual fields, the practice demonstrates that such a dynamic does exist and it encompass knowledge transfer processes from individuals to groups, and from groups to the whole organization. It is a synchronization between individual knowledge fields and the organizational knowledge along the ontological dimension. Organizational knowledge became a strategic resource in the last decades of business development and intelligent managers can transform it into a sustainable competitive advantage for the organization.

Knowledge Creation

The paradox of knowledge creation is the fact that we don't know yet what knowledge is and how to deal with it from the managerial point of view. The Gordian knot of this reality is represented by the nature and understanding of the dynamics between information and knowledge. In the realm of information science and philosophy the concept of information had been introduced by C. E. Shannon as a mathematical construct in order to solve engineering communication problems. In the realm of epistemology and knowledge management, the central concept of another continuum is knowledge. The continuum is defined as the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom (DIKW) hierarchy. Information in this new continuum is not the same as information from the communication theory, and that generates a lot of confusion among researchers and practitioners. The authors present the main ideas of the DIKW hierarchy and of the centrality of knowledge.

Knowledge Dynamics

In the chapter about cognitive knowledge, the author introduced the dyad of explicit-tacit knowledge developed by Ikujiro Nonaka and his colleagues. This dyad represents the conceptual framework of the dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation. The breakthrough of this theory is the SECI model, which consists of four knowledge conversion processes: socialization (from tacit knowledge to tacit knowledge), externalization (from tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge), combination (from explicit knowledge to explicit knowledge), and internalization (from explicit knowledge to tacit knowledge). All of these knowledge conversion processes may happen in Ba, a dynamic context where interactions between people take place. The purpose of this chapter is to present the main concepts and ideas of the dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation developed by Nonaka and his colleagues, a theory that represents a major contribution to the development of knowledge management.

Knowledge Sharing and Communities of Practice

Knowledge sharing is the most important mode of knowledge transfer in social contexts since it is based on the willingness of individuals to impart their experience with other people and not on managerial authority. Knowledge sharing depends on a supporting organizational culture and especially on organizational trust. Knowledge sharing can be enhanced by using the method of appreciative sharing of knowledge that focuses on the positive aspects of organizational phenomena and on building optimism. Since the essential factor in developing a culture of knowledge sharing is trust, the chapter presents some of the most significant conceptual models of the organizational trust. Communities of practice are social structures that have a high absorptive capacity for knowledge sharing. Although they have a rather fuzzy and fluid structure, coming into conflict with the ordered and hierarchical structure of organizations, they are of interest for managers for their enhanced capacity of innovation.

Knowledge Metaphors

Cognitive scientists discovered that the mind is inherently embodied, and that conceptual thinking is largely metaphorical. That means that metaphors are much more than just linguistic tools. They play an important role in our understanding of new concepts and ideas, and in extending the semantic field of some already known. Knowledge is a rather old concept but the emergence of the knowledge economy created new meanings and interpretations for it by using the metaphorical approach. Thus, understanding the new semantic spectrum of the concept of knowledge implies an adequate understanding of the metaphors and their functional structure. The purpose of this chapter is to describe the anatomy of a metaphor and to explain how metaphors contribute to generating new meanings and interpretations for the concept of knowledge.

Organizational Memory

Organizational memory is a generic concept that represents the organizational capacity for encoding, storing, retrieval, and decoding the organizational knowledge. It is an intangible asset of any organization that comprises cognitive, emotional, and spiritual knowledge in their multiple forms. Although many researchers conceived and described organizational memory using as a metaphor individual memory, organizational memory integrates a significant social contribution. Transactive memory is the first extension of individual memory and it is specific for the teams. Organizational culture contributes directly with the emotional and spiritual knowledge to the content of organizational memory. Beliefs, value, stories, myths, and traditions encode fundamental emotional and spiritual knowledge from the organizational history. Organizational memory can be enhanced by technology, especially by information systems. In the last years, new opportunities opened by using Big Data and cloud computing.