Abstract
Purpose: We present and study an analytical model of knowledge management (KM) in which employees’ fit with a firm’s organizational culture improves with their sharing and learning of the firm’s common organizational practices. Design/methodology/approach: Incentive rewards motivate knowledge workers to share their knowledge and contribute to a firm’s central knowledge base. We develop a model in which the firm’s cultural fit changes with the sequence of KM-based business processes including sharing, learning, evaluation, and production, and then analytically investigate the design of knowledge sharing rewards as well as the business process sequence to shape a firm’s organizational cultural fit and maximize its profit. Findings: The best sequence of KM processes is solved in the following order: A (Announcement), E (Evaluation), S (Sharing), L (Learning), and P (Production). The sharing reward for knowledge workers is analytically derived accordingly, which increases with the level of knowledge management systems (KMS) and decreases with the probability of a worker staying in the firm, the probability of a culturally unfit worker being identified by the firm, and the probability of a worker being culturally fit on the labor market. The optimal volume of knowledge base is also investigated with respect to these factors. Originality/value: Applying a novel analytical approach, we model and study KM processes and their relationships with organizational culture and incentives. Our research provides valuable insights for managers to implement KM practices.
5. Conclusion
In this paper, we present a formal analytical KM model capturing the interactions between IT, incentives, and organizational culture from a process perspective, and develop valuable insights for practitioners to effectively manage knowledge assets.
Prior studies have investigated the critical role of IT, incentives, and organization culture in facilitating specific aspects of KM, but they have not considered the joint interactions among these three elements in combination with the role of business processes for knowledge management. We incorporate their inter-relationships in our model and investigate the best design of KM business process sequence and knowledge sharing reward. Specifically, our research makes the following contribution to the current literature.
First, we model four major business processes related to KM activities and analyze how the order of these processes affect the firm’s cultural fit at different stages. The four processes in our framework including sharing (S), learning (L), evaluation (E), and production (P). The sharing process focuses on knowledge capture and codification, learning process represents the transfer of knowledge, evaluation process denotes the assessment of knowledge quality, and production process symbolizes the application of knowledge. Our analysis indicates that different orders of these KM processes result in different organizational cultural fit for workers to engage in knowledge sharing and productions. When the evaluation process is executed before learning process, there will be more culturally fit workers at the end of the period.
