Knowledge Producers and Consumers

IntroductIon In a knowledge-based economy, organizations find it difficult to compete based upon the individual knowledge of a few organizational members. This provides the rationale for knowledge management wherein organizational knowledge must be shared, combined, and reused in order to enable organizations to compete more effectively. Hence, knowledge sharing is considered an essential process in knowledge management. Unfortunately, sharing is often unnatural for the parties involved in it, that is, knowledge contributors or producers and knowledge seekers or consumers. Hoarding knowledge and not accepting knowledge from others are natural tendencies that are difficult to change (Davenport & Prusak, 1998). Knowledge contributors may be inhibited from sharing their knowledge due to perceptions of loss of power, lack of time or incentives, and other barriers. Knowledge seekers may find it laborious to seek advice from others and desire to discover solutions for themselves. Therefore, it is vital to understand and foster the motivations of knowledge contributors and seekers toward participating in knowledge sharing. With the attention to knowledge management and the knowledge-based view of the firm, research in knowledge sharing and its motivations has gained interest over the last decade and a half. 1994) as this appeared to be a more intractable problem than motivating knowledge seeking. Subsequently, knowledge seeking behavior also has been researched (e. although there is still considerably more attention devoted to studying knowledge contribution behavior. Concurrently, the role of technology (known as knowledge management system or KMS) in enabling knowledge sharing has received research interest. However, in spite of the advent of new technology enabled forms of knowledge sharing such as knowledge logging (the enterprise flavor of blogging), the challenges of promoting knowledge sharing persist. This is because culture and management issues appear to dominate over technological issues in ensuring knowledge sharing success. For example, Ruppel and Har-rington (2001) found that employee acceptance of or resistance to Intranets as a knowledge-sharing environment was more of a management and culture problem rather than a technology hurdle. Calls have been made to address both social and technical issues together (Zack, 1999) in order to be able to reap the benefits of knowledge management that have been experienced by some organizations