1 Trust and betrayal in Knowledge Management

Positivist accounts of the KM literature neglect the diverse and socially created nature of knowledge and organizational relations. However, more critical accounts stress a less epidermal approach to the interpretation of KM phenomena and emphasize the contextual and situated nature of KM phenomena. The paper builds on this critique and proposes an alternative approach to trust that allows for the occurrence of betrayal. Here, trust is defined as the faith and belief that one has in their co-workers, the company and its system of ideas. The paper draws on two multinational telecommunications companies that employ similar KM initiatives and reflect polar opposites, i.e. a case of trust and a case of betrayal. Focusing on the individual, as the primary agent of knowledge transactions, the research findings propose that in the presence of organizational and interpersonal mismatches, employees will experience varying levels of trust that will have a significant impact on knowledge-sharing behavior. The egalitarian and unrestricted view associated with ‘sharing’ was contested in both cases. Introduction Positivist accounts of the KM literature neglect the diverse and socially created nature of knowledge and organizational relations. In other words, concepts that can only exist in relation to a context (relational/ processual perspective) are reduced to discrete objects/ assets that can be managed (structural perspective). Such conceptual crudity is manifested in the number of ‘recipes’ and typologies that promise to align existing organizational elements with the ‘new philosophy’ of knowledge sharing. However, more critical accounts stress a less epidermal approach to the interpretation of KM phenomena. Critical accounts of the KM literature build on a more relational approach and emphasize the situatedness and socially constructed nature of knowledge. The review of the literature to follow aims at briefly discussing the unitarist and relational approaches to knowledge, KM and trust