Cross-Functional Knowledge Management

The International Landscape

S.M. Riad Shams, Demetris Vrontis, Yaakov Weber, Evangelos Tsoukatos, Alberto Ferraris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367074234
• eBook ISBN: 9780429665349
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Diverse kinds of knowledge are vital for each organization that would successfully compete today in an international scenario. The emergent relevance of knowledge and its management in an even more complex environment opens up the possibility to analyze, investigate and deepen our understanding on different aspects related to several functional areas in business management. Nowadays, firms that create new knowledge and apply it effectively and efficiently will be successful at creating competitive advantages. The choices of the firms in selecting and applying different knowledge process (such as knowledge sourcing, transferring and exploiting) as well as knowledge tools may be crucial. Thus, the role of knowledge as the key source of potential advantage for organizations and indeed whole economies is still a hot debate in the international landscape. This book develops insights for the management of knowledge in cross-functional business areas to originate an innovative approach to the classical Knowledge Management (KM) field. This book provides a fresh perspective on different knowledge related topics in an international landscape, highlighting the key role of knowledge and its management in business activities. Overall, the primary aim of this book is to extend our understandings on how KM can be helpful in several cross-functional management areas, such as strategic management, finance, HRM and innovation as well as in different business circumstances such as M&A, internationalization processes and risk management.

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The Relevance of Managing Knowledge in an International Landscape

S. M. Riad Shams, Demetris Vrontis, Yaakov Weber, Evangelos Tsoukatos and Alberto Ferraris

Introduction

Organizations all over the world have to face high risks of competition and the possibilities of losing customers. One of the most important factors that causes this problem is that the organizations have a lot of difficulties in facing the rapid changes of market trends (Del Giudice, Della Peruta, & Carayannis, 2010). Very often in different organizations, knowledge management has become the solution to this problem and, simultaneously, the key driver to create customer values (Ting Si Xue, 2017).

With the purpose of taking full advantage of knowledge management, organizations must have a clear understanding on how knowledge is formed (Ipe, 2003; Van den Hooff & Huysman, 2009), in particular in a global scenario. In fact, in an international landscape KM gains crucial knowledge from both inside and outside of the organizations for different reasons such as improving service quality by providing faster service response time (Edvardsson & Oskarsson, 2011; Ha, Lo, & Wang, 2015; Bresciani, Ferraris, & Del Giudice, 2016).

Nowadays, knowledge is one of the most valuable key sources of competitive advantage in different organizations, but in order to fully take advantage of critical knowledge, organizations should explicitly manage it. In fact, Knowledge Management (KM) is the systematic management of vital knowledge—and its associated processes of creation, organization, diffusion, use and exploitation (Skyrme, 2001). Its importance has been recognized for a long time in many and different streams of business management research (Grant, 1996). Within the literature, knowledge management has been analyzed from a multitude of angles. A lot of studies have been conducted in the private sector while less research has been done in the public sector (e.g. Willem & Buelens, 2007).

According to Hackbarth (1998) the main goal of KM is to improve innovation and responsiveness in the exchange of information, in particular inside the organization. Davenport and Prusak (1998) showed that most knowledge management projects have one of three aims: (1) to show the role of knowledge in an organization and to make the process visible; (2) to promote a culture of intensive knowledge by encouraging and aggregating behaviors such as knowledge sharing and proactively seeking; (3) to create a knowledge infrastructure and not only a technical system, understood as a connection between people, given space and time.

In general, novel cross-disciplinary knowledge plays an important role in business management also if we look at the relevance in managing knowledge that resides within and also outside (through networks) firms’ boundaries. This book develops different insights for the management of knowledge in cross-functional business areas to originate an innovative approach to the classical knowledge management (KM) field, in order to underpin research and practice in the wide area of business management.

Key Aspects of Knowledge

Some authors defined knowledge as (1) a state of mind, (2) an object, (3) a process, (4) a condition of having access to information, or (5) a capability (Schubert, Lincke, & Schmid, 1998; McQueen, 1998). Specifically, as a state of mind, knowledge allows individuals to expand their personal knowledge and apply it to the organization’s need (Schubert, et al., 1998). As an object, it can be viewed as something to be stored and manipulated. As a process, knowledge can be viewed as a trial of simultaneously knowing and acting (McQueen, 1998), where knowledge enables acting by applying expertise. As a condition of having access to information, the focus of knowledge is to facilitate access to and retrieval of contents (McQueen, 1998). In this case, knowledge is conceived as the capability to use information to make decisions.

Even though knowledge can be classified at the level of individuals or groups, internal or external to firm boundary, hard or soft, practical or theoretical, the most common and well-known taxonomy is the tacit vs. explicit (Nonaka, 1994; Pathirage, Amaratunga, & Haigh, 2007). Tacit knowledge, according to Mooradian (2006) and Grant (2007), is something personal, an ability, a skill to do something, which is partially based on people’s own experiences, and this is one of the key aspect of KM. Explicit knowledge can be documented, codified and shared, can be stored in digital systems and technological ways, and it is transferable. It can be achieved, collected, transformed, shared, communicated with ease and be accessible to people. This type of knowledge is typically more prevalent in organizations (Joia & Lemos, 2010; Huang, Davison, & Gu, 2011).

Tacit knowledge is difficult to be evaluated and accessed, is less familiar and it creates the background necessary for assigning the structure to interpret and improve explicit knowledge (Polanyi, 1975). Tacit knowledge is different from explicit knowledge as it is usually shared in drawings or writing. Nonaka, the father of this stream of literature, argued that knowledge is formed through the interactions of tacit and explicit knowledge (Nonaka, 1994). Sánchez et al. (2012) added that very often tacit knowledge is meaningless without explicit knowledge, because both types of knowledge are complementary and essential for knowledge creation.

Knowledge can be measured in many different ways within organizations. People employed hold knowledge, known as tacit knowledge, in their minds (Davenport, De Long, & Beers, 1998). Tacit knowledge is hard for others to use, and represents knowledge that is influenced by personal experiences, which are shared when employees meet and share their knowledge in the organization. This kind of knowledge is made up of experiences, information, values and systematic attitudes that provide a proper framework for evaluation of new information and experience. New knowledge is created when employees within the organization share their own knowledge, either tacit or explicit (Hooff & Hendrix, 2004), and this is known as “knowledge sharing”, which is one of the main core processes beyond KM.

Nowadays, the tacit-explicit knowledge classification has become too superficial, because there are many other classifications of knowledge that try to identify useful distinctive knowledge in organizations with a more pragmatic approach. Examples include knowledge about competitors, heuristics rules, products, processes, customers etc. Different authors (Alavi & Leidner, 2001) coined some very famous types of knowledge.

• Individual: knowledge made and deep-seated in the individual;
• Social: knowledge made and deep-seated in the collective group and their actions;
• Declarative: know-about;
• Procedural: know-how;
• Causal: know-why;
• Conditional: know-when;
• Relational: know-with;
• Pragmatic: the essential knowledge for organizations.

Definitions of Knowledge Management

The interest in KM has increased over time, becoming a relevant issue in the late 1980s. KM is a way for organizations to take care of all the existing knowledge within the organization. However, the definition of knowledge management is not easy to identify. Today, we still have the tendency to use the term “knowledge” to describe information systems and databases. In reality, more attention is paid to technological infrastructures that allow the passage of information rather than real knowledge and the transfer of it between people (Nonaka, 1994).

Many authors have given different definitions of knowledge management, identifying different points of interest.

According to Sorge (2000, p. 26):

KM is the managerial discipline that studies business knowledge and is responsible for identifying the methods and tools for its management through an approach based on cultural, organizational and technological innovation; this approach is aimed at developing skills and competences able to increase the company’s competitiveness, optimizing its processes, shortening the “time to market” and orientating its structures in a more functional way to the business.

KM can be also defined as “an emerging set of organizational design and operational principles, processes, organizational structures, applications and technologies that helps knowledge workers dramatically leveraging their creativity and ability to deliver business value” (Gurteen, 1998, p. 6). KM can also be considered as “the practice of selectively applying knowledge from previous experiences of decision-making to current and future decision-making activities with the express purpose of improving the organization’s effectiveness” (Jennex, 2005, p. iv).

Further, according to Gold and other authors (Gold, Malhotra, & Segars, 2001) managing knowledge means to unite the internal and external knowledge of organizations, transforming knowledge into new ideas and strategies. Instead, according to Lytras, Pouloudi, and Poulymenakou (2002), knowledge management is a systematic application of knowledge itself.

There are four main elements and processes in knowledge management (Zaim, 2006; Fong, & Choi, 2009; Turner, Zimmerman, & Allen, 2012) that conceive the organization as a knowledge system:

1. Knowledge Creation or Knowledge Acquisition: This process involves developing new contents, implementation of knowledge or replacing the current contents within the organization’s explicit and tacit knowledge (Pentland, 1995). This process engages a continual interplay between tacit and explicit knowledge, driving the organization to find knowledge inside and outside of the system.
   Four modes of knowledge creation have been identified by Nonaka (1994) in his studies:
   • Socialization: it concerns the transformation of tacit knowledge to new tacit knowledge using social interaction and shared experience between members of the organization;
   • Externalization: it refers to the conversion of tacit knowledge into new explicit ones;
   • Internalization: concerns the creation of tacit knowledge from explicit knowledge;
   • Combination: it refers to creation of new explicit knowledge by synthesizing existing explicit knowledge.
2. Knowledge Storage: Both explicit and tacit knowledge should be stored. Empirical studies contend that during the process of creating knowledge and learning, organizations also forget to store it (Argote, Beckman, & Epple, 1990; Darr, Argote, & Epple, 1995). For this reason, it is fundamental to develop mechanisms with the object to store the information in different forms, as for example written documentation, electronic databases and networks of individuals. There are two types of memory: individual and organizational. The first one is based on personal observations, actions and experiences. The second one is based on knowledge from the past that influences the present activities in the organization.
   This type of memory is divided into two areas: semantic and episodic. Semantic memory indicates general and articulated knowledge. On the other hand, episodic memory concerns the specific context.
3. Knowledge Transfer: This process involves sharing and exchanging knowledge among individuals and their networks (Alavi, Kay-worth, & Leidner, 2005; Carrion, Landroguez, & Rodríguez, 2016). The process of knowledge transfer is one of the most important actions for an organization, in particular to support the process of decision-making, innovation and strategy planning.
   Knowledge transfer take place at different levels: between individuals, from individual to explicit sources, from individual to groups, between and across groups, and from the group to the organization.
   Within the knowledge transfer domain, Gupta and Govindarajan (2000) have structured knowledge in five different elements: (1) perceived value of the source unit’s knowledge, (2) motivational disposition of the source, (3) existence and richness of transmission channels, which is the main focus of literature, (4) motivational disposition of the receiving unit and (5) the absorptive capacity of the receiving unit, defined as the ability not only to acquire and assimilate but also to use knowledge (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990), which is the most difficult to implement, because the re-creation process depends on the beneficiary’s cognitive capacity to elaborate the incoming continuous stimuli.
4. Knowledge Application: This process implies the use of knowledge to adapt the strategic direction, for decision-making, for improving efficiency and reducing costs (Markus, Majchrzak, & Gasser, 2002; Orlikowski, 2002). The source of competitive advantage does not consist in knowledge itself, but in its application in different contexts. There are three primary operations for integrating knowledge to create organizational skills: directives, organizational routines and autonomous task teams. The first method of integration concerns the set of procedures and rules that derive from the conversion of tacit knowledge from specialists in explicit knowledge of non-specialists, to obtain an efficient communication between th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Editorial Note
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 The Relevance of Managing Knowledge in an International Landscape
• 2 Knowledge Management: A Critical Review of Existing Research
• 3 A Knowledge Management Approach in Developing Innovation Within Low-Tech SMEs: The Transcendental Dynamic Capability Concept
• 4 The Center for European Trainees: An Instrument of Cross-Functional Knowledge Management for Internationalization of Vocational Education and Training
• 5 How University-Bound Students in Lebanon Search for Higher Education Institutions
• 6 The Management of Financial Risk Knowledge in the International Conditions
• 7 Identifying Sources and Practices for Knowledge Acquisition: A Systematic Literature Review
• 8 The Risks Associated With Knowledge: Knowledge Risk Management (KRM)
• 9 Behavioral Corporate Finance and Knowledge Management: A Cognitive Approach
• 10 Bottom-Up Approach to Creating Shared Value for Emerging Markets’ Multinational Corporations
• 11 Negotiation, Micro-Foundation and Knowledge Transfer in Mergers and Acquisitions Processes
• 12 A Delphi Approach to Boost an Open Innovation Policy
• 13 The Importance of a Knowledge Management System to Manage Relevant Knowledge in an International Scenario
• Index