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The high turnover rate of knowledge workers presents a challenge to both organizational and personal knowledge management. Although personal knowledge management plays an important role in organizational knowledge management, empirical research on the practices for its application is underdeveloped. This study aims to examine the role of idiosyncratic job-design practices (i.e. job definition, job autonomy, innovation as a job requirement and lifelong learning orientation) in cultivating personal knowledge management among knowledge workers in organizations, to increase their productivity and safeguard the organization against knowledge loss arising from knowledge workers’ interfirm mobility.

Data were collected from 221 knowledge workers pursuing various knowledge-intensive jobs through a questionnaire survey and were analysed using partial least squares modelling.

The results demonstrated that three job-design practices (job definition, innovation as a job requirement and lifelong learning orientation) have a positive impact on personal knowledge management among knowledge workers and thus improve their productivity. However, job autonomy can affect personal knowledge management negatively.

The findings are confined to a specific context and should be replicated across different contexts for better generalizability in future research.

Organizational managers should pay attention to (re)designing knowledge-intensive jobs to cultivate personal knowledge management by clearly outlining job responsibilities, offering opportunities to add relevant job activities and drop irrelevant ones, and making innovation and lifelong learning a formal job requirement. In addition, job autonomy should be judiciously provided along with sufficient social and network support to avoid lost opportunities in knowledge creation and sharing, and should be linked to job responsibilities and performance appraisals to avoid negative effects.

The high turnover rate of knowledge workers presents a challenge to both organizational and personal knowledge management. This study contributes to the literature by addressing the research gap in two aspects. Firstly, based on Drucker’s theory, this study identifies four idiosyncratic job-design practices (job definition, job autonomy, innovation as a job requirement and lifelong learning orientation) that reflect the distinctive characteristics of knowledge-intensive work. Secondly, this study examines whether and how these practices can cultivate personal knowledge management among knowledge workers, which can support their productivity.

This paper aims to explore the coexistence of formal, informal and personal knowledge management (KM) practices as they support employees' everyday work in organizations.

Qualitative study involving 12 in-depth interviews and 30 hours of observations in a small, quickly growing, knowledge-intensive company.

Formal, informal and personal KM practices were all found to be relevant and interconnected in supporting everyday work in the organization. This suggests a shift from understanding KM as an organizational approach to ecology, shaped by multiple actors and concerns and extending over the formal/informal as well as organizational/personal divides. Interrelationships between formal, informal and personal KM practices took various forms. Among each of these KM categories were practices that contributed in a unique way, without having a functional parallel in other categories. Some KM practices had a strong functional overlap and were competing. Moreover, some formal, informal and personal KM practices formed complementary relationships.

Findings are based on fieldwork in only one organization.

Organizations would benefit from the formal, informal and personal KM practices being complementarily connected. As these connections are sustained by employees in everyday work, effective management of KM ecology needs a collective and distributed effort.

This paper is one of the very few empirical accounts that problematizes the coexistence of formal, informal and personal KM practices and suggests a practice-ecology perspective through which their interrelationships could be studied.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the applications of big data in personal knowledge management (PKM).

Five conventional knowledge management dimensions, namely, the value of data, data collection, data storage, data application and data presentation, were applied for integrating big data in the context of PKM.

This study concludes that time management, computer usage efficiency management, mobile device usage behavior management, health management and browser surfing management are areas where big data can be applied to PKM.

While the literature discusses PKM without considering the impact of big data, this paper aims to extend existing knowledge by demonstrating the application of big data in PKM.

Personal knowledge management (KM) lends new emphasis to ways through which individual knowledge workers engage with knowledge in organizational contexts. This paper aims to go beyond an organizational approach to KM to examine key personal KM and knowledge building (KB) practices among adult professionals.

This paper presents a summary of the findings from interviews with 58 consultants from 17 managing consulting firms. Participants were selected based on their knowledge-intensive roles and their willingness to share information about their knowledge practices. Data analysis was inductive and revealed multiple personal KM activities common among research participants, and the way these are supported by informal ties and various technologies.

This work highlights ways in which “shadow information technology” undergirds personal knowledge infrastructures and supports KM and KB practices in the context of management consulting firms. The results uncover how personal knowledge infrastructures emerge from personal KM and KB practices, and the role of informal social networks as well as social media in supporting personal KM and KB.

This study contributes an overall conceptual model of factors that help knowledge workers build a personal knowledge infrastructure. By affording an understanding of socially embedded personal KM activities, this work helps organizations create a balance between KM strategies at the organizational level and personal knowledge goals of individual workers.

Much of the previous research on KM adopts organizational approaches to KM, accentuating how organizations can effectively capture, organize and distribute organizational knowledge (primarily through KM systems).

This paper aims to study the relationship between personal knowledge management (PKM) and organisational knowledge management (OKM).

Based on the proposed framework of PKM and OKM, the author has analytically modelled and studied the strategies of linking the two to manage personal knowledge for organisational purposes.

Applying a framework categorising PKM and OKM from two dimensions – knowledge properties and management perspectives – the author proposes the strategies of personalising organisational knowledge (POK) and organisationalising personal knowledge (OPK) as the effective linkage between PKM and OKM. Integrating a knowledge management system (KMS) into the framework, the author determines the optimal level of KMS in facilitating the implementation of POK and OPK strategies.

Future research may relax some of the assumptions and empirically verify the analytical results.

The research provides guidelines for matching investments in information technology with appropriate knowledge management strategies.

With a unique approach, the paper contributes to the missing link between PKM and OKM.

The authors build on a recent article which highlighted the difficulty that many managers have in understanding why knowledge management (KM) is important for them personally and their organisation. It argued that the issue can be addressed by ensuring that KM is understood in ways that illustrate its managerial currency, actionability and relevance and described how to achieve currency and actionability of the KM idea. This second paper addresses “personal relevance”, the other essential characteristic of usable ideas. The authors illustrate how different managerial roles can appreciate this personal relevance by focusing their activity selectively on different domains of managerial knowledge and specific, targeted knowledge management activities. KM is revealed as a usable idea which enhances their personal effectiveness, organisational influence and credibility as well as long‐term organisational interest. A personal KM audit is presented.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss new approaches for managing personal knowledge in the Web 2.0 era. The paper questions whether Web 2.0 technologies (social software) are a real panacea for the challenges associated with the management of knowledge. Can Web 2.0 reconcile the conflicting interests of managing organisational knowledge with personal objectives? Does Web 2.0 enable a more effective way of sharing and managing knowledge at the personal level?

Theoretically deductive with illustrative examples.

Web 2.0 plays a multifaceted role for communicating, collaborating, sharing and managing knowledge. Web 2.0 enables a new model of personal knowledge management (PKM) that includes formal and informal communication, collaboration and social networking tools. This new PKM model facilitates interaction, collaboration and knowledge exchanges on the web and in organisations.

Based on these findings, professionals and scholars will gain a better understanding of the potential role of Web 2.0 technologies for harnessing and managing personal knowledge. The paper provides concrete examples of how Web 2.0 tools are currently used in organisations.

As Web 2.0 has become integrated in our day‐to‐day activities, there is a need to further understand the relationship between Web 2.0 and PKM.

The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of a research on collaborative personal knowledge registration (PKR). It seeks to explain the interrelationship between records professionals and human resource (HR) and training professionals, as well as the views of management and quality managers on collaborative PKR. It aims to raise awareness of records professionals as specialists in information management, including personal knowledge.

Qualitative methodology was used to conduct the research. It was a multiple-case study, covering 12 organizations in Iceland. In these organizations, 32 professionals were interviewed. The research sought to understand how PKR was being facilitated, as well as how personal knowledge was made accessible and usable for employees.

The organizations had not been as successful as anticipated in PKR. The role and responsibility of records professionals was limited in the PKR process. Different professionals seemed unaware of the possible synergy effect of collaborative PKR.

There is a lack of studies that explore the juxtaposition and collaboration of records professionals and HR and training professionals in organizations. The aim of this research was to bridge this gap. Its originality lies in how it approaches diverse professions and their collaborative PKR effort. This research provides a valuable practical and theoretical contribution to a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of information and records management. It can lay the foundation for further research into the field.

The purpose of this paper is to present a “soft methodology” model in knowledge management that addresses the problem of accessing and managing one particular type of knowledge: personal (implicit/tacit) knowledge.

The model is based on the theories and methodologies of grounded theory, adult learning, collaborative action learning and action research. These are the approaches advocated and used actively by some international action learning associations and business schools. Discusses their philosophy and explores how the values and actions that they advocate can be used to access personal knowledge for professional and organizational learning.

The model presented consists of seven commonly shared values and principles of an action learning and action research (ALAR) culture, captured in the acronym ACTIONS. The paper demonstrates how these seven principles can actually be translated into concrete actions, giving examples from ALAR programs. The matching actions are captured in another acronym – REFLECT. The resulting model, from which are generated seven kinds of personal knowledge, can be used for knowledge management in management education and the workplace.

Provides a model for developing individual knowledge management skills, which is a central concern for corporate universities and business schools.

The purpose of this paper is to mobilize organizations to look at knowledge management through the lens of the individuals whose knowledge they covet and to seek to leverage in order to establish a faster, more flexible and mutually supportive conduit to relevant knowledge and more sustainable knowledge contributions.

This is a discussion paper based on the authors' recent dissertation thesis: “A theoretical model of knowledge strategies for professionals in volatile business settings”.

Organizations can no longer promise lifelong employment even to their best employees. Striving to safeguard employability instead, organizations and individuals can recalibrate the contributive value of their knowledge in a mutually‐ beneficial way even in short‐term, medium‐term or highly volatile employment settings. The resulting bottom‐up approach for managing personal knowledge reduces the friction and mistrust often associated with top‐down knowledge management. It sets the stage for an environment that manages for knowledge, both individually and collectively.

Some individuals have learned to navigate the emerging knowledge economy successfully and craft sustainable value propositions for themselves based on what they know. The research identified the concept of knowledge empowerment and six knowledge strategies and their supporting elements as key enablers for this success. One of these strategies – Lifelong Learning – is explored in detail to demonstrate the transformational power of an additional vantage point that considers individuals as stakeholders and not just as contributors in the knowledge quest. This resets the responsibility for knowledge acquisition, creation and leverage and establishes the need for more extensive personal knowledge management as a subset of organizational knowledge management. This aspect of knowledge management has only been marginally explored in the knowledge management literature to date.