Conclusion and Research Imperatives

Knowledge sharing is a key process in many knowledge management activities, including the capture, transfer, and creation of knowledge. If we abandon the idea that knowledge can be shared as a simple process of communicating information, it might be more appropriate for future theory and research in knowledge management and organizational learning to consider knowledge sharing a problem of collective action among actors with diverse and distributed interests. The literature proposes different solutions to this problem that are worth examining. The first is to install an agency external to the knowledge-sharing process that structures, incentivizes, and monitors knowledge sharing, and punishes defiant behavior. Several problems are associated with this solution, such as choosing the right incentives for sharing and obtaining sufficient information for overseeing sharing activities with some degree of certainty.

Second, the communal resource reduces the social costs of sharing knowledge, eliminating the need to resort to an agency or to large numbers of organizational members. However, where interests are diverse and distributed, the effectiveness of the community as a communal resource depends on its opportunity structures and social norms. Opportunity structures for knowledge sharing work on cues observed among people in the community. These cues cover both task performance and ways to share knowledge. In terms of behavior, communities can deeply improvise or provide rituals. Care is a social norm that gives rise to trust, active empathy, helping behavior, and lenient judgment. Authenticity is a social norm that gives credence to knowledge directly observed in action, as well as the willingness to accept new knowledge. Hopefully, it has been demonstrated that the evolutionary stability of the community matters for a theory of knowledge sharing in organizations, assuming people in an organization hold diverse and distributed interests that change over time. Several poorly understood factors gain significance in determining whether or not the community will reduce the social costs of knowledge sharing. Hence, the role of the community as a resource has still to be determined.

A number of research questions arise out of this discussion that should interest any knowledge management and/or organizational learning scholar who cares about the communal resource. In the vein of the literature on communities within and outside organizations, the existence of community has been assumed a priori. However, as Wenger (1998) argues, there are distinct phases in the formation of a community that should be taken into account. Future research might investigate the characteristics of community formation processes further: which support knowledge sharing? A related question concerns community composition. Both communities of practice and occupational communities consist of people who share work, tasks, problems, and some level of expertise. Nevertheless, during the process of community formation, a central question to pursue might be whether the new affiliate’s background, diversity, and distribution of interests impact the effectiveness of knowledge sharing, as well as the duration of the community.

One consequence of basing the definition of a community on concepts of collective action (e.g. Olson, 1967; Taylor and Singleton, 1993) is that researchers should consider the activities going on within the community as well as its evolutionary stability. Therefore, a community that ceases to operate is just as interesting as communities that survive over long periods of time. A number of important questions about evolutionary stability emerge: How are opportunities for knowledge sharing found in the initial stages of community formation? What are the changes in opportunity structures as the community ages? To what extent do changes in opportunity structures explain the dissolution of communities? One could argue that the inflow of newcomers refreshes viewpoints and regenerates an urge and interest in new insights. How do opportunity structures change with fluctuations in affiliation? Does a constant inflow of newcomers really refresh viewpoints and regenerate new insights? What is the optimal turnover rate of affiliates and how does this relate to community size?

Furthermore, as Brown and Duguid (1991), Cook and Brown (1999), and Wenger (1998) argue, communities of practice need available resources and time to develop. A similar argument is found in studies of collective action. Meeting in so-called free spaces where resources and time are available, affiliates can act without being subject to agency monitoring; they can build social ties outside the existing social structures and develop particular shared norms (Polletta, 1999). Some of these free spaces might initially develop on the Internet or Intranet (Townsend, 2000). What is the relationship between ICT and the emergence of free spaces for community formation? What is the relationship between investments in ICT and emerging opportunity structures for knowledge sharing? What are the consequences of giving affiliates anonymity when sharing (explicit) knowledge? How is the norm of authenticity affected by the use of ICT?

Care is a social norm in the community from which individuals derive utility. It would be interesting to investigate further the emergent rewards related to caring. What factors impact on evolving care in community relationships? Do some caring people lead by example? What is the relationship between care and the integration of newcomers into the community? What is the role of care in the relationship between master and apprentice? Previous work has identified costs to this social norm as well (von Krogh, 1998). Care can be misused as a strategy of over-helping by ignoring what people really need. Care can be used as a strategy of taking others to their own party. What is the relationship between care and over-helping behavior, and what is the consequence of over-helping for knowledge sharing in the community? Researchers working on issues in HR management should observe that studies of caring occupations, such as nursing, have identified potential burnout among people who are expected to act both compassionately and effectively (Pines and Aronson, 1988; see also Sarason, 1985). In many service organizations, ranging from entertainment parks to consulting firms, ‘customer care’ is often the responsibility of communities. As Van Maanen (1991) observes, people who are expected to care for the well-being of customers while downplaying their own (often negative) emotions form strong bonds of solidarity and mutual compassion. Would a community among people who are expected to trade in emotions be related in any significant way to negative conditions, such as burnout or high personnel turnover? How does the pressure for externally-oriented care relate to the emergence of social norms in such communities? Moreover, an issue that deserves attention in the research on learning in service organizations is the effect of externally- and internally-oriented care on the individual worker—in other words, how much care can people take? Research on knowledge management and organizational learning in service organizations, particularly those trading in sentiments, which is blind to the role of social norms and individual emotions will be neither insightful nor practical.22

Schwart and Tomz (1997) show formally that over time, agency can have great advantages over the community in terms of securing superior expertise and knowledge. The reason is that social norms maintained by the community but not questioned by the outside agency could have an adverse impact on accepting and integrating new knowledge (as argued earlier). This finding also raises questions about the potentially negative impact of error-tolerance or lenient judgment. What is the interplay between lenient judgment and the cost of identifying valuable new knowledge? Also, there might be a noteworthy difference between tacit and explicit knowledge. If authenticity is at work, how can affiliates deal with the difference between ready-made explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge evolving through learning, in terms of quality and robustness? People might have a lot to learn from sharing an expert’s trial-and-error with a task, flawed lessons, systematic reporting of experiences, etc. However, cues about valuable new knowledge are often recognized after the fact, that is, as ready-made knowledge. Furthermore, in terms of reducing learning time, preference might be given to explicit rather than tacit knowledge, even at the expense of authenticity.

And finally, as mentioned initially, many knowledge management researchers are interested in community and firm performance. Can we measure community performance, and if so, what are the best measures to use? How should we study community performance empirically? Researchers, in particular those interested in strategic management, should investigate what characteristics of a community impact firm performance. Moreover, in some industries, such as investment banking and management consulting, firms have hired whole teams rather than single individuals. If these teams display the community characteristics outlined in this chapter, it would be interesting to investigate and explain changes in the communal resource as it moves to a new organizational ‘home.’ Related to such investigations, what are the characteristics of capabilities that make firms outperform the industry average in terms of picking, developing, and deploying communal resources (Makadok, 2001)? Do some firms actually learn to distinguish communal resources from communal liabilities? And do they have some particular community nurturing capabilities that make these communities more effective than those in other firms at reducing the social costs of knowledge sharing?

A starting point for answering these questions could be to investigate community performance and the interaction effects of HR management systems. Empirical studies have shown that the quality of HR and HR systems matters for the implementation of strategy and impacts on firm performance (see Huselid, 1995; Slater and Olson, 2000; Lee and Miller, 1999). However, as reasoned in this chapter, communities and HR management systems can pull employees in two directions: individuals derive utility both from being self-interested and hoarding knowledge, and from sharing knowledge in accordance with social norms emerging in the community. Are there particular characteristics of HR management systems, beyond incentives that are conducive to knowledge sharing in communities? In those instances where communities change their organizational home, and individuals change their exposure to HR management systems, these interaction effects could be more pronounced.

Knowledge management and organizational learning as a field of inquiry has never been more exciting. As a construct, ‘knowledge’ offers a powerful bridge between cognition and action at individual as well as social levels. This, in turn, improves our understanding of how organizations work, and how individuals operate within, with, and without organizations. For those who take a serious interest in knowledge, learning and organization, the future is filled with opportunities, challenges, and questions.

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aI am grateful for comments from Hilde Brune, Marla Kameny, Marjorie Lyles, Margit Osterloh, Petra Kugler, Mattaeus Urwyler, Sebastian Spaeth, and one anonymous reviewer. The paper is based on von Krogh (2002)

1For a discussion see von Krogh, Ichijo, and Nonaka (2000).

2A third solution refers to organization size, but space does not allow for further discussion here. For some collective action problems, the individual’s benefit from participation depends on the success of a collective enterprise; and the success of the collective action hinges on the number of people who participate (Chong, 1991). This is a so-called ‘critical mass’ argument. If many people in the organization share their knowledge, more individuals might be interested to join and share as well, since sharing ex ante has provided a strong and valuable combination of individual experiences and benefits. Under conditions of diverse and distributed interests, the likelihood of more people being interested in collective action increases with the size of the organization (Oliver and Marwell, 1988). In a large organization it is likely that more people take an interest in sharing knowledge, even if structure and incentive mechanisms are not conducive to sustaining the sequence of these activities. There might be altruists interested in helping others to learn, but also self-interested individuals who find each other and discover opportunities to realize their immediate need satisfaction, or engage in sharing because they are deprived of other organizational resources (Darrah, 1990). There might also be ‘pockets,’ functions, departments, or areas in the organization, where extensive knowledge sharing has become an integral part of introducing newcomers into the firm (March, 1991), and where people feel ‘obliged’ to share by some professional code (Ferner, Edwards, and Sisson, 1995). An in-depth case study of organizational behavior in a consultancy showed that some professionals might even choose to leave a firm that lacks those pockets of sharing necessary to advance their careers (Ram, 1999). However, there is a cost involved in sharing knowledge that might rise with size of the group (Grant, 1996; see also Oliver and Marwell, 1988), in particular if the knowledge to be shared is tacit, and rates of learning and sharing slow down. Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998) suggest that before knowledge can be shared, individuals must realize the potential for sharing and the benefits involved, and that the cost of identifying opportunities for sharing increases with the size of the organization.

3I am very grateful to a reviewer for pointing out that this process could alternatively be put in terms of Vygotsky’s concept of ‘zones of proximal development,’ in which the process of knowledge sharing turns into a mediated social activity. For an analysis of this concept, see Wertsch (1985).

4When the master ignores the apprentice, this could be a sign of disinterest, dissatisfaction, or doubt. In any event, the task performance and learning of an apprentice who wants to look good in the eyes of the master will most certainly be affected.

5The writing of Foucault (1980) gives a very good indication of how this interdependence has played out throughout human history. In contrast to Foucault, for example, Max Weber was concerned with ‘legitimate power’ arising from superior, sophisticated technical knowledge of operations (Weber, 1978).

6I deliberately define interests broadly because of the later need to capture their situational nature when elaborating on the evolutionary nature of communities.

7Similar conclusions have been reached in other studies of collective action in an organization setting, such as Monge et al. (1998), McCaffrey, Faerman, and Hart (1995), Cabrera and Cabrera (2002).

8A similar discussion is continuing in economics, where the topic is how psychological research modifies conceptions of an individual’s utility function. An important insight is that people occasionally depart from pure self-interest, to pursue ‘other-regarding’ goals, like altruism, fairness, and retaliation (Rabin, 1998).

9An agent here means a person or group that exerts the power to produce an effect, and agency refers to the activities of this person or group. Agency is exogenous to the community. It is key to think of this solution as more encompassing than management in a company, since individuals in the organization may find various ways actually to enforce regimes of cooperation, like another colleague or an entity outside the organization.

10Grant (1996) argued that because of individuals’ bounded rationality, efficiency in knowledge production requires specialization. Likewise, in a large organization, units have an incentive to specialize further and the agency’s role must be to identify opportunities for sharing knowledge as necessary between units, facilitating a bargaining process between units to make knowledge flow.

11Of course, it is possible to observe certain knowledge-sharing behavior in a team. For example, a team member may take an active part in problem solving and decision making by offering valuable suggestions and contributions and by involving and integrating team members. This behavior can be observed by others. However, other team members will not know to what extent one individual has really shared everything she knows of value to the team. More importantly, if knowledge is tacit it can be costly to codify and beyond the reach of individual reflection and identification (Polanyi and Prosch, 1975). Hence, the interest in sharing knowledge, even beyond what people thought they knew, becomes a crucial factor for sustained sharing in the community.

12Recall that knowledge sharing is a sequential collective action problem.

13I think the word ‘affiliation’ is more appropriate than ‘membership’ here in order to highlight the informal nature of the communal resource.

14The term ‘communal resource’ was first introduced by Taylor and Singleton (1993), although I use it differently here.

15This situation is different than so called one-shot collective action. This is a class of problem that introduces very different reasoning, where the construct of ‘communal resource’ does not readily apply (see Franzen, 1995).

16Interestingly, in their analysis of the community’s ability to solve environmental problems, McCay and Jentoft (1998) come to very similar conclusions. Some environmental problems can be traced back to community failure rather than a failure of the market or environmental agencies. Although their analysis tackles a different complex of problems, their study shows that researchers need to show care in identifying both positive and negative factors associated with collective action in communities.

17Free riders can only appraise the value of knowledge once they have learnt the system of cues.

18I used ‘collective identity’ here in a rather narrow sense. Some would include social norms, tradition, social relationships, and processes in identity (Stoecker, 1996).

19An observer of open source software (OSS) development projects, such as the operating system Linux, Himanen (2001) suggests that care is one of the most important social norms of communities of OSS developers. Care involves experienced programmers helping newcomers to learn and improve the code others have made by debugging it. Although people are normally in widely dispersed locations, they work cooperatively over the Internet. Social norms make interactions and the expectations of individual programmers easier to express and comply with.

20Given the definition of interests in this chapter, shared interests are not a prerequisite for trust.

21In this sense, when social norms evolve, affiliates’ social costs can be offset by anonymity (Massey, 1994) offered, for example, through electronic means of communication.

22The work of Sandelands (1988), Foner (1995), Fisher, Nadler, and De Paolo (1983) provides a starting point for further exploration of this issue.