Managing people towards knowledge climates and
the ways they achieve goals. The opposite approach, giving strategic autonomy, ultimately leads to lower strategic alignment.
The result of strategic autonomy is an absence of guidelines and focus on effort. In contrast, having too little operational auton- omy also has the effect of creating imbalance. Here the ‘road maps’ become too rigidly specified, and control drives out inno- vative flair leading eventually to bureaucratic atmospheres. What works best is a balance between operational and strategic auton- omy.
Personalized recognition
Rewarding individuals for their contribution to the organization is widely used by successful corporations. Recognition can take many forms and there are common distinctions: rewards can be either extrinsic or intrinsic. Extrinsic rewards are those such as pay increases, bonuses and shares and stock options. Intrinsic rewards are those that are based on internal feelings of accom- plishment by the recipient, e.g. being personally thanked by the president or CEO, being recognized by colleagues or being awarded an award or trophy.
Successful companies rely heavily on personalized intrinsic awards, both for individuals and groups. Less successful compa- nies place almost exclusive emphasis on extrinsic awards. It would appear that when individuals are motivated more by intrinsic desires than extrinsic desires then there is greater shar- ing and transfer. Nevertheless, it has to be stated that extrinsic rewards have to be present at a base level in order to ensure that individuals are at least comfortable with their salary. Beyond the base salary thresholds it appears that learning and knowledge creation is primarily driven by self-esteem rather than external monetary rewards. Extrinsic rewards often yield only temporary compliance and can promote competitive behaviours which dis- rupt workplace relationships, inhibit openness and learning, dis- courage risk taking and can effectively undermine interest in work itself. Often, when extrinsic rewards are used, individuals tend to channel their energies in trying to obtain the extrinsic reward rather than unleash their creative potential.
Integrated socio-technical system
Highly successful companies appear to place equal emphasis on the technical side as on the social side of the organization. In other words, they look not only to nurture technical abilities and
expertise but also to promote a sense of sharing and togetherness.
Fostering group cohesiveness requires paying attention to the recruitment process to ensure social ‘fit’ beyond technical expert- ise, and also about carefully integrating new individuals through a well-designed socialization programme. Less successful firms seem more concerned with explicit, aggressive individual goals and tend to create an environment of independence, whereas suc- cessful sharers create a much more co-operative environment.
Successful companies, meanwhile, appear to set much more rea- sonable goal expectations, and try not to overload individuals with projects. Too many projects spread effort too thinly, leading individuals to step from the surface of one to the next. These con- ditions create time pressures which militate strongly against sharing, learning and innovativeness.
Availability of resources
Organizational resources act as a cushion and help a company to adapt to internal and external pressures. Availability of sufficient resources correlates positively with knowledge sharing and learning. Indeed, it is not just the availability of resources but the availability of resources over time that appears to have a positive impact upon knowledge sharing and transfer. Less successful knowledge and learning programmes may possess ample resources but often these firms appear to have experienced sig- nificant disruptions or discontinuities in the availability of resources in the past or expect disruptions in the future.
Therefore, knowledge programme success seems to be linked with both experience and expectations concerning availability of resources. The availability of resources, and future expectations of that availability, provide scope for the organization and its members to take risks that they would not do if they had few resources or anticipated interruptions in resource availability.
Organizationally, this indicates the need for ensuring a basin of resources along a variety of critical dimensions (such as time, seed funding for new projects, etc.).
An individual who is given information cannot help but take responsibility’
(Jan Carlson, former Chairman, SAS Airlines)
Measurement and technology
Knowledge, like people, is a resource for companies to harness and from which to obtain returns. However, it is becoming appar- ent that knowledge, as opposed to traditional resources, is actu- ally subject to increasing returns, thus making it more attractive than before to companies. Hence, building up a knowledge resource would enable companies to leverage on a competitive advantage not easily copied by others. The dawning of the impor- tance of the knowledge resource has long been apparent, espe- cially when evaluating companies for the purpose of trading on the stock market. Examples are plentiful of companies trading several hundred per cent over their actual asset value, all due to their ‘hidden value’.
Even though the measurement of knowledge and intangible assets is a science that cannot be mastered accurately, several methods for measuring have been widely used. Some of the methods are briefly described at the end of this introduction.
However, before we move on to these, let us go through some broad fundamentals which originate from the old philosophy of total quality management (TQM) and see how they can be used in this knowledge era.