Knowledge management formal and informal mentoring

Abstract

PurposeAs businesses continue to forge ahead in the twenty‐first century, knowledge management (KM) has materialized as a significant differentiator. The process of creating new knowledge, sharing, and preserving such knowledge, is crucial for achieving competitive advantage. To gain maximum benefit from new knowledge, it must be efficiently integrated into the organization within a continuous knowledge life cycle. In this respect, mentoring is becoming ever more effective as a means to facilitate knowledge creation and sharing and build intellectual capital. This study aims to examine how both formal and informal mentoring enhances KM in the Lebanese banking sector.Design/methodology/approachProfessionals in the Lebanese banking sector were surveyed to measure their perception of the impact of mentoring on their willingness to share information within the organization on both a formal and informal basis. A Pearson correlation was conducted to test the hypotheses.FindingsResults suggest that informal mentoring is highly correlated with KM; whereby the more employees practice mentoring willingly the more knowledge will be shared, preserved, and used within the organization. However, there was little support for formal mentoring.Practical implicationsThe results suggest that management should be highly supportive of informal mentoring as a means to capture and retain organizational knowledge. They should design and reward informal mentoring processes within the organization.Originality/valueThis paper adds to the existing mentoring literature by empirically testing the relationship between mentoring and KM.

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Lessons from the business sector for successful knowledge management in health care: A systematic review

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Knowledge Management Practice at a Bulgarian Bank

“…A study within the Lebanese banking sector has found a strong correlation between informal mentoring and knowledge sharing -the more employees are willingly involved in mentoring, the more knowledge will be shared and retained in organizations (Karkoulian, Halawi, & McCarthy, 2008). The accepted practice in Bank A suggests that employees are encouraged to share knowledge and to convey the same organizational culture values to the newly hired employees.…”

“…Knowledge generation involves creation of new knowledge by the means of brainstorming, interaction, innovation and benchmarking (Sandhawalia & Dalcher, 2011). Research suggests that formal and informal mentoring, communities of practice, research and development, training, shared problem solving, concept mapping, corporate blogging, etc., are some of the best practices for knowledge creation (Karkoulian, Halawi, & McCarthy, 2008;Mizintseva & Gerbina, 2009). Knowledge retention consists of knowledge capture, codification and storage, and deals with the challenge of keeping the knowledge in the organizations when expert workers leave the organization (Levy, 2011;Mishra & Bhaskar, 2011).…”