Executives must create a climate of trust and openness for individuals to share individual knowledge.

Knowledge is identified as a multi-faceted concept, and is distinct from information and data.

Data has been defined, by Haridimos Tsoukas and Efi Vladimirou, as raw entities, and information is understood as a meaningful pattern within these raw entities. Knowledge can be understood as a concept for solving problems. In particular, Knowledge is a combination of rules, procedures, beliefs and skills that positively contribute to solving organizational problems. The key take-away for executives is that knowledge is a resource that enables organizations to solve problems and create value through improved performance and it is this point that will narrow the gaps of success and failure leading to more successful decision-making.

Knowledge, with its wide classifications, can be classified into individual and collective knowledge . Executives recruit followers based on their individual knowledge which refers to the individual’s skills, prior-knowledge, and proficiencies or sometimes referred to competencies. Collective knowledge, on the other hand, has been defined, by Sharon Matusik, as “organizing principles, routines and practices, top management schema, and relative organizational consensus on past experiences, goals, missions, competitors, and relationships that are widely diffused throughout the organization and held in common by a large number of organizational members”.

Thus, collective knowledge is part of the executive’s protocol and comes fairly natural at the higher echelons of the organization. Executives follow Thomas Davenport and Laurence Prusak’s concern that concludes that if an executive cannot inspire its followers to share their individual knowledge with others, then this individual knowledge is not valuable to the organization. Therefore, like tacit knowledge, individual knowledge can become a valuable resource by developing an organizational climate of openness for members to exchange their ideas and insights.

Executives must create a climate of trust and openness for individuals to share individual knowledge.

This is not new, Wolfgang Wagner and Katsuya Yamori show that new technologies drawing on social-software systems through sharing individual knowledge around the organizations can positively contribute to create collective knowledge.

Therefore, executives should build an atmosphere of trust and openness and use technology to convert individual knowledge into valuable resources for their organization to close the performance gap and help organizations prosper. Executives have been now introduced to one important category of knowledge. Knowledge can be articulated, or shared, and executives can now assess whether knowledge is a valuable factor for commercial objectives.

Read more at How To Manage Organizational Knowledge Without Killing It

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