Enhancing Organisational Creativity through Socialisation
Meliha Handzic and Mark Chaimungkalanont
School of Information Systems, Technology and Management, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
m.handzic@unsw.edu.au

ABSTRACT

The unifying thread among current theoretical views in knowledge management is the perception that creativity and innovation are the key drivers of organisational long-term economic success. However, there is far less clear understanding about how to manage knowledge to enhance organisational creativity and turn it into innovative behaviour. Many past knowledge management projects which focused solely on technology failed to deliver on their promises. Therefore, organisations are looking for alternative solutions. The focus of this study is on socialisation. Socialisation forms a vital part of the knowledge creation spiral. It is assumed to contribute to organisational creativity by enabling tacit knowledge to be developed and transferred among individuals and groups through shared experience, space and time. The main objective of this study was to empirically test, through an industry survey, the impact of socialisation on organisational creativity. The results of the study show significant relationships between informal as well as organised forms of socialisation, and organisational creativity. The results also indicate that informal socialisation had a stronger positive effect on creativity than organised socialisation. These findings have important implications for knowledge management research and practice. For research, they contribute important and previously lacking empirical evidence confirming the value of socialisation in innovative organisations. For practice, they suggest that a set of interconnected strategies to enable and encourage continued informal socialisation needs to be formulated. The key is to provide encouragement without delving into coercion.

Keywords: knowledge management, socialisation, creativity, survey