Research On Some Fundamental Knowledge Sharing Issues Within Organization

We have entered knowledge economy era. Having replaced the traditionalproducing elements such as soil, capital and labor, knowledge has become the mostimportant strategical resource. Knowledge management has become the indispensablechoice of organizations to overcome the challenges brought from rapidly changingenvironment, vehement market competition and changeful client demand. Knowledgesharing becomes the core difficulty in implementing knowledge management. Whatare the main obstacles to knowledge sharing, what is the internal process and essentialcharacteristics of knowledge sharing, how to spirit up knowledge sharing and how toestablish the successful knowledge sharing mechanism, these questions are the blankarea in current research and need greatly to be answered. Under these background, thispaper retrospect the developing process of knowledge management and knowledgesharing theories, analyzes the definition and characteristics of knowledge sharing, anddiscusses the obstacles, the motivating and operating mechanism of knowledge sharing.Making use of game theory, this paper builds up mathematical model to describeknowledge sharing and analyzes the equilibria with complete and incompleteinformation respectively. The conclusions of this paper are made use of to analyze atypical knowledge sharing case.The most significant results and innovations are as follows:Firstly, this paper puts forward a systematic research framework to studyknowledge sharing. This research frame includes the obstacles, motivating, internalmechanism and intrinsic characteristics of knowledge sharing, the building up ofknowledge sharing mechanism is also included in this framework.Secondly, making use of game theory, this paper builds up mathematical model todescribe knowledge sharing with complete information, the equilibrium of the model iscalculated to analyze the internal mechanism and economics meaning of knowledgesharing. Knowledge workers always seek to maximize utility under the rationalhypothesis.Thirdly, this paper divides the motivating of knowledge sharing into twocategories: one is among knowledge workers, the other is between knowledge workersand organization. The former includes exogenous inspiriting and endogenousmotivation. Exogenous motivation means economic benefit, and endogenousmotivation plays a role by such ways as building up reputation, acknowledgingcontributions, providing challenging tasks and establishing credit. The motivationbetween knowledge workers and organization is a typical principal-agent problem. Insymmetrical information, optimal motivating level may be obtained when the marginalexpectation revenue equals to marginal expectation cost. The design of motivatingcontract is based on the statistical inference concerning two factors. One is whenknowledge workers reach certain knowledge sharing level with ordinary efforts, theother is the estimation of how actively they participate in knowledge sharing activities.Finally, making use of bionics and biological theories, this paper puts forward theknowledge sharing fermenting model. This model contains such key elements asknowledge sharing bacterial strain(the valuable knowledge to be shared), knowledgesharing enzyme(the sharing desire, motivating mechanism, knowledge brokers andcoordinators), knowledge sharing bodies(active knowledge and passive knowledge),suitable environment, necessary knowledge and information technology. The outcomeof knowledge sharing fermenting is knowledge increase which means knowledgeworkers obtain new knowledge through sharing knowledge. That process is conductedin various fermenting bars. Furthermore, this paper generalizes several typical teamknowledge sharing fermenting and analyzes the selecting standards of differentknowledge fermenting types. Scientific organizational structure, necessary technologyinfrastructure and favorable culture are very important in knowledge sharingfermenting...