National Knowledge Management Research meeting "Made in Holland" (7)

Daan van Tienhoven, Ebru Göçmen, Boudewijn Elsenburg (Erasmus University, RSM): The influence of unit performance requirements on knowledge sharing between units

In their daily work they found resistance to share knowledge over business units and wanted to find out why. They investigated the relationship between two constructs:

  1. KPI’s/targets
  2. knowledge sharing

How do the organizational goals influence inter-unit knowledge sharing?

They defined several types of organizational goals:
- Quantitative-qualitative goals
- Learning-outcome - performance goals
They joined these two goals because quality relates to learning and quantity relates to performance. These do split into hard and soft goals. They found that hard goals, such as KPI’s (key performance indicators), tend to obstruct knowledge sharing, soft goals encourage and stimulate it.
- Less strict boundary goals (?? Didn’t quite get this one…) > There were no conclusions on the influence of this goal on knowledge sharing.
- Time horizon (short-/long-term) goals > There were no conclusions here either.

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