Knowledge Sharing in Emerging Economies

One of the new factors in Eastern European countries (and there is an acknowledgement that this aspect is inherent in other countries too) is this concept of freely sharing information i.e. the concept of what is known in KM literature of “Knowledge Sharing”. Sharing only takes place where there is trust and where there is a shared feeling of ownership of goals. The reasons behind the tendency to share are based on the kind of interpersonal relations between coworkers inherent within the organization and the effects of social relationships within organizational teams. Strengthening the social relationships between individuals in the team is crucial in motivating team members to share knowledge. New research is currently investigating the concept of “sharing social relationships” and one of the aims of the project is to investigate the barriers to sharing information in a particular type of business that of the small to medium sized enterprises (the SME) in order to form a comparative study. The results of the study will be used to from a model of “information sharing best practice” for SME who are setting up or using KM systems. The work will examine the barriers to sharing in two newly emerging economies (Poland and Hungary) and one relatively established economy (the UK). At the time of writing the work with Poland and Hungary has been completed and this paper gives the initial results from the Hungarian study.