Towards Sustainable Knowledge Sharing Practices: An Analysis of Organizational Level Enablers

Abstract

Sustainable management activities focus on creating efficiencies and value for organizations. Scholars advocate that evaluating and enabling appropriate management interventions can pave the way for future competitive advantage and sustainability. Knowledge management is regarded as a key organizational resource and a means of gaining a sustainable competitive advantage. This is especially important in high-tech service organizations, which are under increasing pressure to capture, process and share knowledge efficiently. While much work has been conducted to advance our knowledge on good practices, there is a dearth of empirical evidence relating to organizational level enablers for knowledge sharing. We advocate that creating the conditions conducive to knowledge sharing influences an organization’s ability to sustain a long-term competitive advantage. Therefore, this current study extends the literature on knowledge management by exploring the questions of whether and how key organizational factors impact knowledge sharing, focusing on the role of trust, communication, reward systems and leadership. To do this, we analyzed prior work and generated hypotheses relating to relevant enablers. We then operationalized these constructs via a structured data collection instrument, which consisted of 27 measurable items. Empirical data were collected from 104 team members in a high-tech service organization in Ireland. Data were analyzed using a quantitative approach, and descriptive statistics, correlations and regression analyses are presented. Our research offers a persuasive body of evidence supporting the notion that trust, communication, reward systems, and leadership strongly impact knowledge sharing in organizations. Specifically, the findings reveal that employees are more willing to share their personal knowledge with those they trust, and carefully designed communication systems can enable knowledge sharing. Reward systems play an important role in affecting employees’ motivation to share knowledge, while empowering leadership and participatory leadership are two main drivers in promoting knowledge sharing. This research addresses a relatively unexplored area, has implications for sustainable management practices relating to organizational design and provides ideas for future research studies.

The critical success factors’ investigation during knowledge management implementation within SME enterprises: a Participatory Design opportunity

“…Bearing this in mind, Participatory Design can be considered as an opportunity to stimulate the good use of technology and its effectiveness through a sharing culture and participatory leadership [ 16 ]. Technology itself does not foster knowledge sharing, as this depends rather on a separate extrinsic motivation that can come from organizational culture and top management encouragement [ 9 ].…”

“…For this reason, as we could see from the example presented by Squad, the use of Participatory Design can be recommendable to establish an environment that encourages people to interact with one another before KM implementation and thus paving the way to enable sustainable knowledge sharing as part of the organizational culture [ 16 ].…”

“…Squad could better explore peoples’ engagement towards knowledge sharing through the implemented practices if it used the same methodology of participation internally on the group by inviting other team members from the company—including more leaders—and more inside and outside consultants to help to design the practices for the pilot plan. This could have fostered a participatory leadership [ 16 ] as well as a culture of local participation to implement KM [ 68 ] which could have helped to give effectiveness to the practices once they were implemented. The fact that only one partner participated in strategic KM design and in Squad meetings hampered the diffusion of a behavior prone to KM in the organization.…”

“…Cormican et al [ 16 ] stress that empowering leadership and participatory leadership are two main drivers in promoting knowledge sharing. Indeed, ethnography analysed that one of the company’s partners was responsible to kick-start Squad to implement KM.…”

“…In SMEs promoting KM diffusion is vital to innovativeness and to maintain their competitive position [ 12 , 13 ]. KM is an opportunity to foster organizational knowledge through the coordination of people, processes, and technologies with sights to knowledge creation, sharing, and application aiming at achieving businesses’ goals and sustaining competitive advantage [ 6 , 14 – 16 ]. Thus, the success of any firm depends on this intangible resource [ 17 ].…”