فرهنگ سازمانی و اشتراک دانش: طراحی مشوق ها و فرآیندهای کسب و کار Organizational culture and knowledge sharing: design of incentives and business processes

1. Introduction Knowledge may be interpreted from a process perspective, which emphasizes knowledge management (KM) as the management of knowledge flows and the corresponding iterative and interactive processes of creation, storage, transfer, and application of knowledge. During KM processes, information technology plays a crucial role in growing and managing organizational knowledge. For instance, information technology helps establish communities of practice (Baird and Henderson 2001, Pan et al. 2015) and supports the development of effective knowledge markets within organizations (Davenport and Prusak 1998, Zhang and Jasimuddin 2012). The digital economy has brought KM many new opportunities by refining its processes with the emerging technologies. For instance, the recent development of social software enables knowledge workers to easily collaborate and exchange information and knowledge (Hemsleya and Masona 2013). Cloud-based technologies allow organizations to capture, store, and retrieve valuable information and knowledge with low costs. XML-based data structures and web services facilitate knowledge codification and extraction within organizations. These latest technologies have significantly extended the landscape of traditional KM and simplified the ways for knowledge workers to participate in organizations’ KM initiatives. However, technology is only one of the many factors affecting the performance of KM initiatives. Many other factors also play important roles in KM activities such as learning capacity (Simonin 1999, Peltokorpi 2016), perceivable organizational support (Wayne, Shore, and Liden 1997, Kim, Eisenberger, and Baik 2016), innovative working behavior (Janssen 2000, Tu and Lu 2013), social status (Thomas-Hunt, Ogden, and Neale 2003, Beck, Pahlke, and Seebach 2014), value of knowledge (Cummings 2004, Pacharapha and Ractham 2012), and participation inequality and conversational interactivity (Kuk 2006, Lai and Chen 2014). Among all the factors, a supporting organizational culture is crucial to motivate knowledge workers to contribute their knowledge in an organization (Davenport and Prusak 1998, Jarvenpaa and Staples 2000, Jasimuddin and Zhang 2013). Organization culture is often considered as “a system of shared values and norms that define appropriate attitudes and behaviors for its members (Tushman and O‘Reilly 2002)”, which may facilitate or inhibit some of the KM processes. For instance, a culture suffering from knowledge hoarding, apprehension about failures, and the “Not-invented-here” syndromes inhibits knowsledge sharing and capture (Michailova and Husted 2001). Incentives that motivate KM efforts and activities can help relieve such syndromes, leading to a KM-friendly culture (Szulanski 1996, Chang and Lin 2015); therefore, organizations need to offer incentives to motivate workers’ participation in KM processes.