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Volume 5 Issue 2, May 2007
Sharing Knowledge in the Organization: A Retrospective Analysis and an Empirical Study
Haris Papoutsakis
Technological Education Institute, Crete, Greece
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Knowledge has long ago been recognized as an important asset for sustaining competitive advantage. Recently, the use of information technologies for knowledge sharing within an organization has been identified as an important tool for managing organizational knowledge in order to improve business performance. This paper starts with a retrospective analysis of the basic theories that during the course of the 20th century gave birth to the 'Knowledge-based theory of the firm' mainly developed by Robert Grant, Ikujiro Nonaka and Karl-Erik Sveiby. The retrospect starts with Robert H. Coase's 'transaction cost economics' that first succeeded in linking organization with cost and then, goes on to the 'resource-based view of the firm' (Prahalad and Hamel, von Krogh & Roos, Wernerfelt) where research emphasis has been given to the importance of alternative organizational resources, including intellectual capital, as a source of sustainable competitive advantage.
Then the paper focuses on Knowledge Sharing, within the organization, and describes the Knowledge Sharing Networks that facilitate this complicated task. This is based on Michael Zack's Knowledge Management Architecture framework with the use of Knowledge repositories and refineries.
In the research field, through the results of an empirical study on 51 medium to large size industrial companies in Spain with a total of 112 manufacturing groups, representing 5 industrial sectors (alimentation, automotive, chemical and pharmaceutical, electro-mechanical, and textile), the paper evaluates the role and the level of contribution of Information Technology functions and infrastructure among knowledge sharing groups, to their relationships and to the organization's performance. Finally, building upon both the theoretical analysis and the empirical results, the paper concludes with guidelines that help management overcome existing barriers and at the same time, make Knowledge Sharing Networks the backbone of their knowledge sharing infrastructure.
Keywords:
organizational knowledge, knowledge sharing networks, information technology, organizational performance.
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