Cultural resistance to KM persists
Share or hoard
One of the survey questions also looked at whether the organizational culture was more knowledge sharing or knowledge hoarding. About 60 percent responded "knowledge hoarding," and the other 40 percent was "knowledge sharing." That is curious because one would expect knowledge sharing to dominate because trust and respect, reciprocity and shared values were rated high. That did not appear to be the case. However, the grapevine effect was rated high in a previous question, perhaps suggesting that word often spreads through informal networks as many of the surveyed organizations may be exhibiting more formal knowledge hoarding practices.
To better understand the behavior, respondents were asked why they felt that their organizational culture was either a knowledge sharing or knowledge hoarding one. The frequent responses are shown follow.
Knowledge hoarding
- lack of leadership and management understanding of how KM can actually solve the real problems;
- "knowledge is power" and power means "sphere of control" not influence—thus, hoarding means that you are a gatekeeper and can determine things;
- lack of values, intellectual freedom, micromanaging, tight employment conditions;
- management has not prioritized knowledge retention and sharing;
- many people spend their entire careers in one job (i.e., knowledge is power to them);
- fear of layoff ("security needs");
- silo effect;
- institutional secrecy ("need to know" basis versus "need to share");
- internal competition (competitive, backstabbing culture);
- organizational downsizing;
- self-centered focus;
- fear of being criticized for the knowledge; and
- leadership wants total control.
Knowledge sharing
- strong loyalty;
- employee recognition;
- people are facilitators, not gatekeepers;
- generational issues;
- rely on one another to get a massive amount of work done; and
- transparency and accountability are expected, which forces some sharing of knowledge.
Recommendations to reduce cultural resistance for KM
The last question addressed how best to reduce cultural resistance for KM initiatives in organizations. The key responses from the survey were:
- improve interpersonal and organizational communications;
- more senior management attention/champions and involvement;
- reduce people's workloads;
- show the benefit, both individually ("What's in it for me?") and organizationally;
- trust and respect (improve team building and trust building);
- create conversations;
- reduce the silo approach by encouraging knowledge communities and other KM approaches to cut across the functional stovepipes;
- make it easy for the user to implement;
- improve IT resources to enable easy knowledge sharing;
- don't call it KM perhaps—call it something that will be integrated into the fabric of the culture;
- develop a carefully thought-out KM strategy and implementation plan;
- change the reward structure to include knowledge sharing;
- apply knowledge engineering techniques to knowledge management;
- align the KM strategy with the strategic mission of the organization; and
- incorporate KM into the new employee on boarding, at all levels.
[References: Nina Evans, "Destroying Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing in the Workplace: A Reverse Brainstorming Approach," Knowledge Management Research & Practice, 2012.
Elana Zeide and Jay Liebowitz, "Knowledge Management in Law: A Look at Cultural Resistance," Legal Information Management, 2012.]
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