Is Knowledge Hiding Killing your KM Program?
Monday, May 23rd, 2011
For most organizations knowledge management (KM) means trying to get employees to share knowledge amongst each other or for codification into an on-line repository. By one report, firms spent $70 billion dollars on KM systems in 2008. A huge investment in knowledge sharing with little to no return. The reason? Generally employees don’t want to share knowledge, or if they do they have already figured out how to do it.
This issue is explored rigorously for the first time (as far as I know), in a just published article in the Journal of Organizational Behavior on Knowledge Hiding in Organizations. The researchers found that employees tended to engage in three modes of knowledge hiding including evasive hiding, rationalized hiding and playing dumb. While engaging in knowledge hiding is driven principally by mistrust there are individual and organizational psychographic factors involved as well.
The prevalence of knowledge hiding despite a huge technology investment to the contrary signals that we cannot ignore the underlying cognitive psychology of knowledge work if we want to create value with KM.
It is time to step back from our technologically-driven and psychologically oversimplified approaches to KM and ask – what is knowledge and how can we manage it based on how minds really work? KM needs a good dose of cognitive design STAT.
