Learning strategies of workers in the knowledge-creating company

This study presents a critical examination of Nonaka and Takeuchi's theory about knowledge-creating companies (1995), taken as one example of contemporary management theories concerning innovation and learning. Two main questions are investigated. First, how is the learning of workers organized in the knowledge creation theory? Second, how is their learning related to the work they perform? Answers to these questions are sought from case-study research into work-related learning projects (Poell 1998) and from theoretical notions about learning networks in various work types (Van der Krogt 1998). Our first conclusion is that Nonaka and Takeuchi seem to assume that workers will learn only within the boundaries set by management. They do not, however, take into account that workers organize a great deal of learning themselves, frequently irrespective of management expectations. Second, Nonaka and Takeuchi expect workers to learn according to rigid bureaucratic principles in a work context emphasizing innovation. The theory of knowledge creation does not show how these contrary principles might be successfully integrated.     

Learning in and from projects: the learning modes and a learning capability model

Abstract

The notion of ‘project delivery’ is well embedded in and across the management and organizational sciences literature – generating a narrative that reflects and recognizes the instrumental nature of projects and programmes in strategy execution. Project management, as a distinct and well-established body of research enquiry, has increasingly sought to focus our attention on the impacts of complexity, risk and uncertainty in projects; the corollary being a desideratum to strengthen our theoretical understanding of how insight and learning from projects may influence improvements to organizational efficiency. The wider literature suggests that organizational learning remains a challenging proposition, particularly in the context of organizations operating in environments of high complexity. In this paper, we enhance the conversation on organizational learning through a series of case studies, generating evidence of thirteen ‘learning modes’. The paper proposes that mature organizations tend to exhibit a greater number of learning modes and that there is a tendency to capture and socialize knowledge with a greater emphasis on the context of the learning situation rather than the learning artefact in isolation. The empirical evidence gathered in this paper forms the basis of a capability model, characterized by the thirteen modes of learning. The model intimates that learning occurs, and is more effective, when knowledge and information are enacted in practice through the learning modes which form a nucleus of the organizational learning capability. The research concludes with a 'call to action' that emphasizes the strategic importance of learning practices and routines in project oriented-organizations.     

学习能力与企业绩效:知识资源是中介变量吗

基于知识观和组织学习理论,本文就以下问题展开研究:其一,探讨学习能力与企业绩效之间的关系;其二,将知识资源视为影响学习能力与企业绩效的中介变量,探讨三者之间的关系;其三,考察组织内、外部学习能力对企业绩效的不同作用路径.研究结果发现,知识资源在内部学习能力与企业绩效之间扮演着部分中介的角色;而在外部学习能力与绩效之间扮演着完全中介的角色.本项研究较为深入地揭示了学习能力、知识资源与绩效之间的关系.     

The impact of emotion on organizational learning

This paper addresses an aspect of organizational learning that has not been extensively developed - the impact of emotion on organizational learning. The study of emotion in organizations is seen as an important part of the development of organizational learning. The paper argues that attention to the emotional dynamics of organizing, and to the links between emotion and organizational politics, will increase the possibilities for understanding organizational learning. Awareness of the impact of emotion on organizational learning can be developed through an investigation of two areas. First, organizational learning is more than a product of organizational responses to individual learning. Emotion contributes to a broader understanding of systemic learning. Second, emotion is important to strategic aspects of organizational learning. There is a link between the emotional and the political within organizations. The paper contains a discussion of these themes using brief case examples to illustrate and develop the issues.     

Introduction: Knowledge Construction and Creation in Organizations*

While adopting a knowledge‐based perspective on organizations has been valuable, since, among other things, it enables us to see links between organizational learning and a firm's competitive advantage through the development of idiosyncratic capabilities, it has nonetheless tended to treat organizational knowledge as ‘given’, exploring how it is related to other ‘given’ variables. The focus of this special issue is to unpack the notion of organizational knowledge by exploring the processes and practices through which knowledge is constructed and created in organizations. A constructivist perspective assumes that ‘knowledge’ presupposes work and seeks to explore how what comes to be considered as organizational knowledge is established and validated (or fails to do so). By seeing organizational knowledge as work we can further probe into how knowledge is shaped by organizational strategies and incentives and, more radically, how power and politics influence the struggle between competing bodies of knowledge in organizations.     

Enriching Absorptive Capacity through Social Interaction

Absorptive capacity is frequently highlighted as a key determinant of knowledge transfer within multinational enterprises. But how individual behaviour translates into absorptive capacity at the subsidiary level, and how this is contingent on subsidiaries' social context, remains under‐addressed. This not only limits our understanding of the relationship between individual‐ and organizational‐level absorptive capacity, but also hampers further research on potentially relevant managerial and organizational antecedents, and limits the implications we can draw for practitioners who seek to increase their organization's capacity to put new knowledge to use. To address this shortcoming we conduct an in‐depth comparative case study of a headquarters‐initiated knowledge transfer at two subsidiaries of the same multinational enterprise. The findings demonstrate that social interaction is a prerequisite for subsidiary absorptive capacity as it enables employees to participate in the transformation of new knowledge to the local context and the development of local applications. The findings also illustrate how organizational conditions at the subsidiary level can impact subsidiary absorptive capacity by enabling or constraining local interaction patterns. These insights contribute to the absorptive capacity literature by demonstrating the scale and scope of social interaction as a key link between individual‐ and organizational‐level absorptive capacity.     

The Effects of Transformational Leadership on Organizational Performance through Knowledge and Innovation*

Today's information and knowledge society requires new leaders who can confront a reality based on knowledge and foster innovation to achieve improvements in organizational performance. However, organizations sometimes fail to achieve sustainable competitive advantage due to their limited understanding of the relationships between these strategic variables. To date, very little research has analysed the direct and indirect relationships between these variables. Our study seeks to fill this research gap by analysing theoretically and empirically how the leader's perceptions of different intermediate strategic variables related to knowledge (knowledge slack, absorptive capacity, tacitness, organizational learning) and innovation influence the relation between transformational leadership and organizational performance. Based on the literature, we develop a theoretical model that shows the interrelations between these variables. We then test the model using data from 408 Spanish organizations, discuss the findings and provide several implications for business practitioners.     

An approximate summarization method of process data for acquiring knowledge to improve product quality

This paper describes a machine learning approach for a manufacturing database. The method is presented in the Nb-Ti superconducting wire domain. A Nb-Ti superconducting wire is produced by iterating the drawing and heat treatment operations. The purpose is to obtain approximate summarization of process data that describes how a production schedule can be improved for better product quality. The method consists of the following steps: First, define a ranking function for a production schedule. Then, generate 'positive' and 'negative' instances for improving a production schedule by comparing a pair of schedules and their ranking values in the database. Using a machine learning technique, called 'ID3', a 'modification patterns' are obtained that generalize the data for better production quality. The final step is to extract approximate information from the induced patterns, which is both desirable for easier understanding by human experts and necessary to avoid being too much influenced by excessive details or disturbances. Two criteria are proposed, correctness and applicability indices, for this approximation.     

Knowledge Accession and Knowledge Acquisition in Strategic Alliances: The Impact of Supplementary and Complementary Dimensions

This paper advances the concepts of knowledge accession and knowledge acquisition in strategic alliances by identifying supplementary and complementary dimensions to these knowledge transfer modes. Complementary knowledge transfer reflects the similarity of knowledge that the partners have and is conducted in pursuit of higher efficiency and productivity to enhance partner firms' existing competitiveness. Supplementary knowledge transfer occurs when partners each possess distinctive core competences and the information that is acquired or accessed increases the business scope of partners. As knowledge accession entails knowledge amalgamation that does not involve organizational learning, costs associated with the transfer process are lower and trust is easier to establish than in the case of knowledge acquisition. The paper reviews the implications of these transfer modes on trust building in alliances and their costs implications and presents a number of propositions for further exploration.     

Task partitioning in new product development teams: A knowledge and learning perspective

R&D alliances and outsourcing elements of the new product development process are now commonplace practices among many firms. However, little previous work has examined how these organizational choices influence project knowledge and learning. Based on a comparison of three new product development projects in the software industry, this paper examines how task partitioning in the project influences learning and knowledge development within the firm. The paper suggests that internal development projects encourage synthetic learning and development of architectural and tacit knowledge; in contrast, outsourcing and joint ventures encourage analytic learning and development of component and explicit knowledge.     

The Effects of Knowledge Management on Team Members' Ratings of Project Success and Impact*

Many organizations are trying to improve the generation and utilization of knowledge. The activities associated with these efforts are identified as organizational knowledge management (KM). While much has been written about knowledge management from the organizational level, the success of such efforts over the long run will depend upon on how KM activities impact important outcomes as perceived by those at the employee level who actually implement the activities. This study used the input‐process‐output framework of team effectiveness to investigate the relationship between selected KM‐related activities on integrated product and process development team members' satisfaction with their project's success and the impact they expected it to have on the organization. The results indicate that team‐level leadership and support (i.e., inputs), along with knowledge generation and dissemination (i.e., processes), are key drivers of member performance‐related ratings (i.e., outputs). Finally, and possibly most importantly, a number of interactions were evident suggesting that the KM processes moderate the effects of the KM inputs. These findings and their implications are discussed.     

企业跨部门心理安全、知识分享与组织绩效间关系的实证研究

知识分享是组织学习研究领域中的一个热点话题,本研究旨在探讨跨部门心理安全对组织内部知识分享以及组织绩效的影响机制。本文实证研究发现,组织跨部门心理安全与组织知识分享、组织绩效之间均存在"倒U"关系,而知识分享会对组织绩效的提升产生正向影响,知识分享在跨部门心理安全对组织绩效的作用中扮演中介角色。研究发现有助于加深我们对跨部门心理安全与组织知识分享、组织绩效间作用关系的深入了解,为企业管理实践提供有益的借鉴和启示。     

Knowledge transfer of the Western concept of quality

This paper addresses one of the issues in contemporary globalization theory: the extent to which there is 'one best way' in which business can be conducted and organizations managed. It uses Czarniawska's 'travels of ideas' model as an organizing framework to present and understand how the concept of 'quality', so important in contemporary approaches to manufacturing and services, and their management, travelled to, and impinged on, a newly opened vehicle assembly plant in Poland. The extent to which new meanings were mutually created in the process of translation is discussed, using ethnographic reporting and analysis techniques commonly used in diffusion research. Parallels between the process of translation as an idea becomes embedded into a new cultural location and the processes which contemporary research has identified as important to organizational learning are briefly discussed in conclusion.     

Organizational learning and knowledge in public service organizations: A systematic review of the literature

This paper is a systematic review of the literature on organizational learning and knowledge with relevance to public service organizations. Organizational learning and knowledge are important to public sector organizations, which share complex external challenges with private organizations, but have different drivers and goals for knowledge. The evidence shows that the concepts of organizational learning and knowledge are under-researched in relation to the public sector and, importantly, this raises wider questions about the extent to which context is taken into consideration in terms of learning and knowledge more generally across all sectors. A dynamic model of organizational learning within and across organizational boundaries is developed that depends on four sets of factors: features of the source organization; features of the recipient organization; the characteristics of the relationship between organizations; and the environmental context. The review concludes, first, that defining 'organization' is an important element of understanding organizational learning and knowledge. Second, public organizations constitute an important, distinctive context for the study of organizational learning and knowledge. Third, there continues to be an over-reliance on the private sector as the principal source of theoretical understanding and empirical research and this is conceptually limiting for the understanding of organizational learning and knowledge. Fourth, differences as well as similarities between organizational sectors require conceptualization and research that acknowledge sector-specific aims, values and structures. Finally, it is concluded that frameworks for explaining processes of organizational learning at different levels need to be sufficiently dynamic and complex to accommodate public organizations.     

组织知识转移与学习能力的系统研究

知识转移可以为组织带来比较竞争优势,而组织学习可以提高其对未来不确定环境的适应能力,因此,两者的共同作用可实现组织的持续成长.在回顾关于组织的重叠知识、知识转移以及学习的相关文献基础上,分析了重叠知识与组织知识转移,以及与组织学习的关系;从组织生态学角度构建了它们之间的关系模型,进一步论证了重叠知识可以充当优化知识转移效率与组织学习能力的调节器;最后给出了一些知识转移的管理寓意分析.     

Should knowledge be distorted? Managers' knowledge distortion strategies and organizational learning in different environments

Organizational learning provides a sustainable competitive advantage for an enterprise facing a highly volatile environment, and managers' knowledge sharing strategies are of vital importance to organizational learning. This study systematically evaluates the effects of managers' knowledge distortion types (i.e., misrepresentation and omission), distortion levels, and distortion preferences in a formal organizational context under various environments. Multi-agent simulation results demonstrate that a slight level of managers' knowledge misrepresentation and a high level of managers' knowledge omission are beneficial in a closed system. With increasing turnover rate, both misrepresentation and omission are detrimental. Moreover, in an open system with environmental turbulence, misrepresentation is valuable to performance, while omission is neutral. In general, misrepresentation plays a leading role in the simultaneous combination of two distortion strategies. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.     

Understanding the Antecedents of Effective Knowledge Management: The Importance of a Knowledge‐Centered Culture*

Within the context of knowledge management, little research has been conducted that identifies the antecedents of a knowledge‐centered culture—those organizational qualities that encourage knowledge creation and dissemination. In this study, the existing literature on organizational climate, job characteristics, and organizational learning (in the form of cooperative learning theory) are linked with the current thinking and research findings related to knowledge management to develop a theoretical model explaining the relationships among organizational climate, the level of cooperative learning that takes place between knowledge workers, and the resulting level of knowledge created and disseminated as measured by team performance and individual satisfaction levels. The study goes on to empirically test the proposed research model by investigating the climate of organizations, and seeks to understand the linkage between a set of organizational and individual characteristics and knowledge‐related activities found in cooperative learning groups and the resulting work outcomes. The hypothesized research model is tested using LISREL with data collected from 203 information systems (IS) professionals engaged in systems development activities. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications the results have for future research and managerial practice.     

组织学习与知识转化的关系及IT对二者影响的探讨

基于组织学习与知识管理理论,将组织学习过程的4I模型与知识创新的SECI模型进行整合与扩展,探讨了组织学习的个体、团队及组织3个层次与隐性知识与显性知识2类知识形式的对应关系,以及组织学习过程与隐性-显性知识相互转化过程的动态匹配关系.与以往研究中将知识转移、共享与扩散作为一个知识的单向传递过程所不同的是,认为知识转化是一个螺旋上升的循环过程,是包含知识创新的持续学习过程,而IT将促进组织学习与知识转化的结合.最后,通过一个案例分析以展示IT对企业组织学习与知识转化的积极影响.     

基于知识管理的敏捷组织学习二维度模型框架

如何在知识管理先进思想的基础上,充分利用信息技术来促进组织学习,是当前企业管 理的主要研究问题之一. 在剖析了两个具有代表性的组织学习模型基础上,提出了一种基于知 识管理的敏捷组织学习二维度模型框架. 在该模型框架中,充分考虑了组织学习的核心内容, 并围绕学习主体和学习工具的互动关系,对组织学习过程进行了构建. 文章不仅详细给出了该 模型框架的建立过程以及实施要素、原则和方法,而且通过一个案例具体说明了该模型框架在 企业项目建设中的实际意义和应用价值.