The barriers of knowledge generation, storage, distribution and application that impede learning in gas and petroleum companies

Abstract

Purpose – This paper aims to find and rank the barriers of the four knowledge management (KM) processes including generation, storage, distribution and application in the gas and petroleum sector. Design/methodology/approach – Reviewing the literature of KM and organizational learning, this paper extracted all of the barriers which impede KM processes. Then it designed a questionnaire for validating, ranking and categorizing barriers. Totally, 190 completed questionnaires were gathered from 26 gas and petroleum companies in Iran. Some statistical tests such as T, Friedman, Kruskal–Wallis and Mann–Whitney were used for analyzing data. Findings – Findings reviewed the current literature of KM barriers, validated and ranked the barriers of knowledge generation, storage, distribution and application separately. The importance of knowledge generation and knowledge application barriers were significantly different between gas and petroleum companies. Hence they were disjointedly ranked for gas and petroleum. Finally, KM barriers were ranked according to their contribution to KM processes and the average mean of their importance in KM processes. Practical implications – From the practical point of view, this paper suggests managers of gas and petroleum companies to emphasize solving high-priority barriers according to the KM process which they are focused on. Furthermore, the study provides a checklist that can be used as an assessment tool for evaluating KM processes considering barriers. Originality/value – This paper finds the importance of each barrier for each of the four KM processes and ranks the “critical barriers” according to their contribution to four KM processes in the gas and petroleum sector.

Linkage between contextual factors, knowledge‐sharing mediums, and behaviour: Moderating effect of knowledge‐sharing intentions

“…This study reveals that embeddedness and explicitness of knowledge are important factors in determining KSB, which helps in understanding the nature of the knowledge to be shared (Cummings & Teng, ). The analysis supports prior empirical studies (Cummings & Teng, ; Kim & Lee, ; Ranjbarfard et al, ) to show the importance of organisational and technological factors in determining the KSB of the employees of organisations. The nature of knowledge and the environment of the PSUs (from organisational and technological perspectives) are prerequisites for motivating KSB among employees (Yang, ).…”

“…The measure for contextual factors has been adopted using six items (EC1–SRC4; four items each for environmental and source and recipient context and three items each for knowledge and relational context) from the studies of Ranjbarfard et al () and Cummings and Teng (); for example, “There is well coordination between different departments of the organisation” and “Differences in my knowledge base and that of my immediate senior/junior managers, make knowledge‐sharing difficult.”…”

“…Normally, the organisations and the individuals are reluctant towards the changes in KM because of the structural conflicts and unjust reward systems (Kim & Lee, 2006). Similarly, effective knowledge sharing is not possible without information systems and technologies (Hendriks, 1999;Pillania, 2008b) such as data mining, cloud computing, knowledge portals, and workflow (Ranjbarfard, Aghdasi, López-Sáez, & Emilio Navas López, 2014).…”

An Exploratory Study on Knowledge Management Process Barriers in the Oil Industry

“…From the theoretical perspective, it is one of the first studies analysing KM process barriers in oil industry, making possible to outline future research directions on this topic. Our study validates the findings of other studies addressing the KM process barriers, like Ranjbarfard et al [70], Patil et al [4] or Wong and Aspinwall [9] regarding the typology of barriers they identified, even though a different set of barriers were considered in our own research.…”

“…Absorptive capacity describes, in this case, the ability to identify, assimilate, transform, and apply external or new knowledge by each member of the organization [70,109,124].…”