دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی مشاوره رشد، تعهد سازمانی عاطفی و اشتراک دانش در شرکت های حسابداری دولتی - امرالد 2017

Introduction

A persistent challenge facing organizations, especially public accounting firms1 , is encouraging employees to share their knowledge with others at work. Knowledge is a critical organizational resource (Wang and Noe, 2010, p.115), which leads to “superior firm innovation capability” (Lin, 2007, p. 315), making it one of the most important resources for competitive advantage in organizations (Pan and Scarbrough, 1998). DeLong (2004) explains that knowledge lost due to an aging and more mobile workforce is a serious threat to knowledge-based organizations’ continued success and sustainability, while the creation and application of new knowledge is also essential to the survival of almost all businesses (Gurteen, 1999). Knowledge sharing (KS), the willingness of individuals in an organization to share with others the knowledge they have acquired or created (Gibbert and Krause, 2002), has been proposed as a means for leveraging the skills, knowledge, and best practices possessed by individuals across organizations, and is especially important in accounting firms, as these service firms depend on the quality of services provided by their professionals to succeed.

Discussion and conclusion

Because professional service firms’ value is in their ability to provide expert and comprehensive solutions, individual knowledge and the ability to leverage it are critical to their success. Innovative solutions transfer from one professional to another through active knowledge sharing (KS). Knowledge can be explicit or tacit. Explicit knowledge is objective, context-free and easy to encode and store, while tacit knowledge is personal, difficult to express with words, figures or formulas, and is usually contextual in nature (Koriat and Gelbard, 2014). Collaborative behaviors, knowledge sharing in particular, are among the mechanisms used to make this tacit knowledge surface, facilitate innovation and creativity, give the organization value, and improve its performance (Choi and Lee, 2003). KS is a means for leveraging the skills, knowledge, and best practices possessed by individuals across an organization. Therefore, firm management should take steps to identify and cultivate KS. Mentoring (both formal and informal), present in many public accounting firms, may provide a way to increase KS.

Mentoring programs are already in place in many professional service firms; recognizing increased KS as an additional benefit of mentoring, and understanding how this phenomenon occurs is valuable. Our research provides this insight.