3.6 Organization
3.6.2 Knowledge-sharing and organizational culture
Organizational structure and organizational culture combine to effect a knowledge-sharing environment. Al-Alawi, Al-Marzooqi and Mohammed (2007: 32) list the following factors affecting organizational culture in terms of knowledge-sharing:
• Trust - interpersonal trust or trust between co-workers is an essential attribute in organizational culture, which is believed to have a strong influence over knowledge- sharing. Team members require the existence of trust in order to respond openly and share their knowledge.
• Communication between staff – communication here refers to human interaction through oral conversations and use of body language while communicating. Human interaction is greatly enhanced by the existence of social networking in the workplace.
This form of communication is fundamental in encouraging knowledge-sharing.
• Reward system – according to Syed-Ikhsan and Rowland (2004), employees need a strong motivator in order to share knowledge. It is unrealistic to assume that all employees are willing to offer knowledge easily without considering what may be gained or lost as a result of doing this.
• Managers – they must consider the importance of collaboration and sharing best practices when designing reward systems. The idea is to introduce processes in which sharing information and horizontal communication are encouraged and rewarded. Such rewards must be based on group rather than individual performance.
There are other factors relating to organizational culture which may also influence whether employees will choose to share their knowledge. Employees with shorter organizational tenure are more likely to share knowledge. This could be as a result of the new employee wanting to fit in. In wanting to fit in, new employees are unlikely to antagonize older employees by hoarding
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knowledge. Furthermore, employees with a shorter organizational tenure know less about the organization and its processes than people with longer tenure. In wanting to increase the chances of learning more about the organization, newer employees will want to share in the hope that others will share with them. Conversely, people with longer organizational tenure may share their knowledge simply because they know more of the right people in the organization.
In a study undertaken by Connelly and Kelloway (2003), they found that gender was not a significant predictor of organizational knowledge-sharing. In addition, Connelly and Kelloway (2003) found that employees in smaller organizations are more likely to rely on one another and to interact with one another both professionally and socially. The organizational culture of smaller organizations lends itself to knowledge-sharing because necessity dictates it.
Steyn and Kahn (2008) believe that while technology can greatly enable effective knowledge- sharing, the willingness of people in organizations to share knowledge and information can prove to be a critical constraint to the implementation of knowledge management and developing a knowledge-sharing culture. Conditions of trust, shared norms, values and obligations and expectations, common content and language are crucial to the establishment of a knowledge- sharing culture. In this instance, the human resources management (HRM) function can play a crucial role in enabling knowledge-sharing by creating and maintaining an organizational climate conducive to such conditions. Scarborough and Carter (2000) suggest that HRM practices can best contribute to managing knowledge by influencing employee behaviour. Through practices such as performance management, career structuring, recruitment and selection, career management and organizational development, an environment conducive to knowledge acquisition, utilization and sharing can be created.
In many instances, the organizational culture may be formed by the organizational structure. As in the case of the bureaucratic organizational structure of public organizations, knowledge- sharing may be slow and cumbersome. Thus organizational structure may have an impact upon the organizational culture of knowledge-sharing.
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The success of knowledge management initiatives in an organization rests heavily upon its culture (Platt 1998). Organizational culture has proven to be a strong predictor of intention to share knowledge. Creating a work environment where lawyers are intellectually stimulated and challenged is very important. Minimizing the low value-added work in a lawyer’s practice is just one way in which knowledge management creates a more rewarding work environment.
Knowledge management involves identifying low value-added work and developing systems and processes to minimize the time spent on those elements. This results in lawyers having more time to spend on intellectually stimulating and challenging work. They may also be able to work fewer hours and lead a more balanced life.
Peer behaviour, in particular the expectation that one’s peers will share, is a significant contributor to the organizational culture of sharing. Wolfe and Loraas’s (2008) study found that incentive schemes contribute to the culture of sharing. At a firm where lawyers are not rewarded financially for referring work to colleagues, there is no incentive to promote knowledge-sharing across practice groups. In some law firms, the ‘knowledge is power’ culture means that lawyers believe their career prospects largely depend on the ability to amass a unique base of knowledge.
Sharing that knowledge with others would dilute its value because of the importance of billable hours. To date, most law firms consider expertise to be a support staff issue and have concentrated more on the technology than on cultural change. They have also failed to implement any form of incentive to encourage lawyers’ participation – they rely on goodwill instead (White 2002). However, if peers believe that co-workers are not contributing to sharing, then incentives do not act as a significant motivator (Wolfe and Loraas 2008). According to Rusanow (in White 2002) one of the biggest cultural barriers to knowledge-sharing is the time- based billing model, which has the potential to create a disincentive to maximizing efficiency.
Any time spent on sharing knowledge is time not spent on billing – in a law firm time is money.
According to Rusanow (2004) most large law firms are generally taking knowledge management very seriously. They recognize that theirs is a knowledge business, and they too suffer from the
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challenges of connectivity, globalization and speed (Rusanow 2004). However, it is difficult for lawyers to see the intrinsic value of many of the practices that knowledge managers try to enforce. The legal profession is an exclusivist one: it reaps value from being able to deploy specialist knowledge that is not generally accessible. The knowledge management mantra that says indiscriminate knowledge-sharing is good, does not make sense to this culture (Lambe 2003). However, Rusanow (2009) believes that when introducing a knowledge-sharing culture to the organization, all stakeholders need to become involved. Sharing is not the prerogative of lawyers only. Other members of the organization also contribute to it.
The next section of this chapter will draw a link between organizational structure and design and knowledge-sharing.