The Practice of Knowledge Management in a Rentail Familiar Company in Minas Gerais (Mg): A Case Study

Abstract

The Family Companies have an important role in national economies and, specially in the Brazilian one. However its importance and feasibility are questioned. Good part of such questionings has a focus on the managerial limitations often observed in the management of Family Organizations. As a consequence the search for solutions under the managerial scope is an urgent issue for the survival of Family Companies. Within the myriad of current organizational strategies, knowledge management has emerged as an important competitive differential. Following this track, the objective of this article was to verify how knowledge management (KM) in a rentail Family Company in Minas Gerais (Brazil) occurs. A qualitative case study was carried through, based on data obtained from observations and interviews with managers. The results led to KM's practices (JÓIA and OLIVEIRA, 2007): exchange of knowledge in meetings, study groups, incentive to innovation and dissemination of knowledge by personal contact. The conclusion highlighted how much the company's environment favored KM's practices due to the a favorable field for the development of innovation, creativity and sharing of implicit knowledge.

The family social capital impact in practices of learning, change and innovation in entrepreneurial family businesses

“…The innovation in family businesses is the family's command result in the generation of new ideas, which result in different products (Emmendoerfer and Helal, 2008), based on the nature of organizational and constitutional way, as well as the rooted culture in the organizational leaders' profile. Ramos and Helal (2010) used the Emmendoerfer and Helalmodel model (2008) and Hansen et al (2007) model for the purpose of studying how the knowledge is generated and transformed innovation in a FB, breaking the myth that organizations are traditional and contrary to the new ones. The innovation was characterized by the actions of the organizational leaders (Forges and Hamel, 2000) in relation to the succession process and the successor's arrival as possibilities to modify "old patterns" (Leone and Leone, 2006;Lima et al, 2005), besides, the inter-entrepreneur's presence as the innovation propeller (Borges, 2009;Robichaud, 2000).…”

“…As a result, these authors classified the small and mid-sized family businesses as traditional and the big as innovative. For Ramos and Helal (2010), the family businesses contribute to the technology administration development, to the extent that they develop a favorable environment to the innovation, creativity and the tacit knowledge sharing.…”