Organizational culture and knowledge sharing: design of incentives and business processes

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to present and study an analytical model of knowledge management (KM) in which employees’ fit with a firm’s organizational culture improves with their sharing and learning of the firm’s common organizational practices.

Design/methodology/approach

Incentive rewards motivate knowledge workers to share their knowledge and contribute to a firm’s central knowledge base. The authors develop a model in which the firm’s cultural fit changes with the sequence of KM-based business processes including sharing, learning, evaluation, and production, and then analytically investigate the design of knowledge sharing rewards as well as the business process sequence to shape a firm’s organizational cultural fit and maximize its profit.

Findings

The best sequence of KM processes is solved in the following order: (Announcement), (Evaluation), (Sharing), (Learning), and (Production). The sharing reward for knowledge workers is analytically derived accordingly, which increases with the level of KM systems and decreases with the probability of a worker staying in the firm, the probability of a culturally unfit worker being identified by the firm, and the probability of a worker being culturally fit on the labor market. The optimal volume of knowledge base is also investigated with respect to these factors.

Originality/value

Applying a novel analytical approach, the authors model and study KM processes and their relationships with organizational culture and incentives. The research provides valuable insights for managers to implement KM practices.

Citation

Zhang, Z. (2018), "Organizational culture and knowledge sharing: design of incentives and business processes", Business Process Management Journal, Vol. 24 No. 2, pp. 384-399. https://doi.org/10.1108/BPMJ-08-2015-0119