Citation:
Lammers, Johan (2009) ‘The human factor in knowledge management for development: using theories from social psychology to investigate the predictors of knowledge behaviour in development organisations’, Knowledge Management for Development Journal, 5: 2, 127 — 142

Summary:
“This article consists of an analytical overview of theories from Social Psychology with respect to knowledge behavior in development agencies. This provides an extensive theoretical background before presenting the results of a cross-cultural study towards the frequencies and predictors of six types of knowledge behavior. In this research 445 people from 89 nationalities participated. The results of the analysis and the study point towards the same outcomes. Attitude, organizational culture, self-efficacy, controllability and motivation are significant predictors of knowledge behavior. It concludes that leadership and human resource management have significant tasks in addressing and nurturing the human factor in knowledge management strategies and implementation in order for those strategies to succeed.”

If you are interested to receive this research, please contact us for a free copy.

We have posted some of the results already on this website. If you are interested please visit:
- The Human Factor in Knowledge Management for International Development Cooperation [Relevance]
- Using a KM Framework to Measure Behavior in Knowledge Processes
- Does the size of the organization matter for knowledge management?

Or visit the ‘research results‘ category on this blog.

We think knowledge management plays an important role in spurring innovation and knowledge sharing all around the world for the benefit of all. Let’s make the world a better place! Together: we know more!

It has been a little quiet on our website the last weeks. This is because we are working on a number of great new products like a website to host Twitter chats around the #KMers hastag, and writing a few articles. We are now really back on track again and wanted to share our new company profile with you (you can also find this under “approach and services”). If you are interested to know more, please do not hesitate to contact us!

Knowledge management forms the basis of learning organizations and communities, which:
- Are adaptive to their external environment
- Continually enhance their capability to change and innovate
- Use the results of learning to achieve better results
- Reduce redundant work and avoid reinventing the wheel

weknowmore.org is a young, innovative organization active in the wide spectrum of knowledge management and learning within non-profit sectors.

We support organizations in the development and execution of their knowledge management strategies.

We strongly believe that an organisation’s primary focus should be on developing a knowledge-friendly culture and knowledge-friendly behaviours among its people, which should be supported by the appropriate processes, and which may be enabled through effective and efficient collaborative technology.

weknowmore.org delivers services within all three domains, which allows for a comprehensive integrated approach. We deliver in-house training on different topics around knowledge management, tailored to the needs and daily realities of our participants and clients. We facilitate the development of knowledge management strategies and effective processes to support knowledge behavior.

And we have a vast experience in developing innovative collaborative technologies, like:
- Online Learning Communities
- (Distance) Learning Environments
- Knowledge Repositories
- Company Blogs
- Intra- and extranets

All of our products are build using open source platforms supported by large communities. This ensures innovative, cutting edge applications, and it cuts down the costs since there is no software licencing involved.

We are social media evangelists and love its potential to connect people and ideas all around the world. We share the latest insights on knowledge management, learning, education and social media on our Twitter page. LinkedIn hosts the weknowmore.org Think Tank, where diverse issues around weknowmore.org’s own strategy are discussed. You can also find us on Facebook, SlideShare, YouTube, and Delicious.

In order to develop our approaches and products we conduct worldwide cross-cultural research on topics related to knowledge management. Our latest study was on The Human Factor in Knowledge Management for Development in which more than 500 people from over 90 different nationalities participated. This research investigated psychological theories to predict knowledge behavior in development agencies. The results were published in The Knowledge Management for Development Journal. We used the outcomes of this research to develop training modules and approaches focused at development organizations.

All this enables you to strengthen your organization in dealing as effective as possible with the most important asset it possesses: People with their knowledge!

Connecting people and knowledge.
Together: we know more!
weknowmore.org

If you want to know more about us, or about what we can do for you do not hesitate to contact us by mail [research@weknowmore.org]

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We are proud to present the first guest article on our website. This article was written by Robert Terry, Managing Director of ASK Europe.

Together: we know more!

For what it’s worth? …

If we really are – as the cliché runs – all metaphorical prostitutes, then while we have our feet up we might want to reflect on our business model. So, in the spirit of a related cliché, let’s think about the price. When it comes to deciding the worth of human capital, our achievements – the good stuff on our CVs that gets us the job interview – undoubtedly matter. Like a Profit & Loss Account or a Balance Sheet, however, they are primarily historic evidence of our ability – a snapshot in the rear view mirror. Unlike their fiscal counterparts, they are also self-edited: where we are ‘in the red’, the metaphorical Tippex can be discreetly applied. Those to whom we sell ourselves buy us on a combination of a basis of this historic “evidence” and of their estimate of what they expect us to be able to do for them in the future. They are – quite literally – punters.

That the valuation process is less than logical and far from cut and dried is illustrated by British Airways’ recent appeal to its staff to volunteer to work unpaid. While this appears to be – and your own judgement may say that it actually is – a shallow, despicable strategy, it is also an example (albeit perverse) of a company valuing the ‘human capital’ of its trained staff. In this case, of course, valuing means ‘calculating the price of’ as much as it means ‘respecting, cherishing or nurturing’. Appropriately for an airline, British Airways is also reacting to turbulence: it expects to come out of the current downturn and is therefore weighing the various costs of recruitment, retraining and redundancy. In the meantime, it is hoping that a downturn across its industry will mean that its employees cannot escape to competitors, taking their human capital with them, and that it can therefore avoid the very real cost of actually paying them to stay until recovery happens.

The BA example is, of course, out of the ordinary. Our value as people is mostly measured by the market place calculation of the benefits that have to be paid to us (salary, working conditions and hours, perks) in order to secure our services. As employees, we can earn only what someone is prepared to pay us (although our individual motivations may lead us to accept higher or lower figures). It is generally assumed that the figure in some way reflects the benefit we can bring to a business, although any calculation here is usually a bottom-line one along the following lines:

• profit divided by staff = x
• salary plus other benefits plus percentage of over heads = y
• which is bigger, x or y? (And where y > x, y/n -> exit. Repeat.)

How we estimate the benefit someone brings to a business is a complex argument, not least as some employees will always be purely an overhead (can your time or output be charged to a customer?) while performing a function the business has presumably decided at some point is required. But no matter how abstract the equation becomes, goodwill – in more than one sense – doesn’t necessarily come into it. And while that may sound like a cynical remark (and familiarity really does breed contempt, just as age is an ingredient of wisdom), there are reasons why it is rarely factored in.

David Bowie may have sold his future recording royalties as ‘Bowie Bonds’ (and been accused of triggering global economic meltdown as a consequence, which surely overvalues his influence on the world), but – for most of us – estimating our on-going worth is a slippery fish to wrestle with. Some of the difficulties that arise are undeniably reasonable: there are many risks attached to employing people, only some of which – death and sickness – can be insured against. But employees can equally be subject to pressing family issues, unfortunate affairs with secretaries or legal mishaps. They can also lose heart, go off their jobs, or develop alternative aspirations: they are human.

But it seems that organisations genuinely do struggle to value people in a positive sense. We can say that an existing workforce that is made up of competent people who happily and efficiently co-exist, have been trained in the business’s methods and systems, have relationships with customers and suppliers, and the past experience to help them make sound decisions quickly. And we would say that such a workforce has a value. To replace it would cost recruitment fees, training fees, salaries for the time taken to train, the part of their salaries that is unproductive until relationships and experience are gathered, the lost opportunities due to lack of training and so on. But this is a value only in the sense of, for example, putting a workforce on an insurance policy: “how much would a new one cost”?

Yet our value as workers and employer is also in our skills, our attitudes and behaviours, our experience and particularly our knowledge. Even knowledge may not be the best word here: wisdom – knowing when to use which knowledge and in which way – may be closer. Like another important aspect of our benefit to an organisation – the effect and impact of our working relationships – wisdom and knowledge are abstract commodities. We can assess then by implication – by measuring productivity, by using psychometric tools to identify potential strengths and weaknesses – but we are groping at outlines rather than drawing sharp definitions. Human capital has no single definitive unit of measure. Even IQ means little in the abstract: intelligence is neither quite wisdom nor its application.

How far might we benefit from finding a better approach to valuing and weighing human capital? The de-layering of the management structure of many organisations over the last couple of decades, for example, resulted in a lot of ‘middle management’ being ‘let go’. But what was the value of the knowledge and experience that they took away? Given the commentary on the impact of the lack of this level of experience in the financial industry during the current banking crisis – where many commentators contend that few knew how to spot or respond to a crisis as none had been employed long enough to have worked through the last one – isn’t this an important question? And if a key element of an organisation’s forward competitiveness and profitability resides between the ears of those on its payroll, where is the (ahem) wisdom in outsourcing when the knowledge and experience behind the function is – albeit perhaps nominally – the nominal property of the company paying the worker?

The level of investment in KM strongly implies that organisations value knowledge: why else spend large sums on extracting, storing and disseminating it? The development and implementation of IT – and especially of knowledge management systems – has also impacted on the ‘value’ of people. 30 years ago, for example, a tax advisor was expected to learn and recite all the tax rates and rules and calculate liabilities quickly in their heads: this was a core skill, which their salary or charges reflected. Now a junior employee needs only to enter some key client data into the computer to arrive at the same calculation.

But other types of knowledge are not so easily automated. Is our wisdom and our final value as individuals in the workplace ultimately one of those abstract human qualities that lie enigmatically beyond the scope of IT or of quantifying? (It occurs to me that many of the blockbusting sci-fi films that have grabbed our collective attention are technological dystopias: AI; 2001; Terminator; I, Robot – much as we hope technology will solve all our issues, some element of human essence cannot be captured within it. There’s a critical difference between crunching data and interpreting it.) It’s hard to tell whether this acknowledgement that individual human capability may elude our ‘bottling skills’ is an admission of the current frontiers of applied IT, or that current employment practice – that employees no more expect a ‘job for life’ than organisations anticipate offering one – must accept that ‘knowledge’ will move on. Organisations capture what they can before the target moves on. (Our human response to this bottling process and its impact on our relationships with each other raises a whole new host of issues too, as Mark Gould points out in this and many other blog postings.)

Unlike our metaphorical colleagues in an older profession at the start of this article, our value should increase with age: our aesthetic charms may fade, but our experience, skills and knowledge will accumulate. While one focus of organisations has been to extract knowledge from people and find ways of cataloguing in ways that make it accessible (and, it is hoped, still meaningful), the learning & development function wrestles not to squeeze knowledge from employees but to squeeze more wisdom in. (And without effective means of quantifying the outcomes and displaying evidence, it will increasingly struggle to fund its activities.)

A school child once innocently responded in an examination to the question “What is the best way to keep milk fresh?” with the guileless but logical answer “By leaving it in the cow?” This could be a great example of that old English saying ‘out of the mouths of babes …’ Or it could be a hint to place slightly higher value on the cows.

As individuals, our abilities and wisdom are a lifetime’s investment: they are, effectively, our critical bargaining cheap in the modern labour market. But we must each battle to continuously raise the value of x in response to every change in our employers’ calculations of y if we are to stay on the right side of the equation. In the meantime, organisational learning & development activity strives to help us increase x, while cost accounting, KM and prevailing management trends look to tip the equation in the other direction.

Organisations are rarely making such a long-term investment: people appear on the balance sheet as a present cost, but not as a future value. Although investing in the development of existing staff is typically cheaper than recruiting and inducting new ‘talent’, the latter option is usually seen more favourably. And shedding staff is frequently seen as a valuable exercise in cost cutting.

Surely if we want to invest wisely for the organisational future, we need to arrive at a better estimation of the likely value of that in which we invest. Wanting to value human capital tomorrow while seeking to cut human costs today is to muddle a chicken and egg argument – and then sell the chicken.

Robert Terry, Managing Director of ASK Europe.

You can find new blog posts on weknowmore.org starting next week. At the mean time we have our Twitter page where we share other excellent articles related to Knowledge Management. If you are interested, you can easily join the people and organizations that already follow us there! If you do not know what Twitter is, or how it can be useful for you, read 17 ways you can use Twitter here.

Introduction

Knowledge sharing can be a demanding and uncertain process. At the individual level, it may evoke perceptions of conflict of interest or vulnerability (e.g. Argote et al., 2001). For example, Ardichvili et al. (2003) found that ‘fear of criticism’ and ‘fear of [inadvertently] misleading others’ can inhibit knowledge sharing.

Previous research has connected knowledge sharing to a variety of managerial and organizational factors and to transient, situation-specific attitudes and motives including specifically interpersonal trust, which is the evaluation of the trustworthiness of specific others (such as managers and peers; Dirks and Ferrin, 2001; Levin and Cross, 2004).

Defining Trust

Interpersonal trust can be defined as “the willingness of a party to be vulnerable.” In the context of knowledge creation and sharing in informal networks, research suggests two dimensions of trust that promote knowledge creation and sharing:

• Benevolence - ”You care about me and take an interest in my well-being and goals”)
• Competence - ”You have relevant expertise and can be depended  upon to know what you are talking about”)

Trust is caused by a combination of all kind of variables. One of these is the earlier discussed earlier when looking at the Big Five: agreeableness. While such a personality factor is hard to change, there are some ways that leadership can promote and influence the level of trust within the department or organization. They follow here below.

Influencing and promoting interpersonal trust

Trustworthy Behaviors

1. Act with discretion Keeping a secret means not exposing another person’s vulnerability; thus, divulging a confidence makes a person seem malevolent and/or unprofessional.

• Be clear about what information you are expected to keep confidential.
• Don’t reveal information you have said you would not . . . and hold others accountable for this.

Promotes: benevolence trust

2. Be consistent between word and deed When people do not say one thing and do another, they are perceived as both caring about others (i.e., they do not mislead) and as being competent enough to follow through.

• Be clear about what you have committed to do, so there is no misunderstanding.
• Set realistic expectations when committing to do something, and then deliver.

Promotes: benevolence and competence trust

3. Ensure frequent and rich communication Frequent, close interactions typically lead to positive feelings of caring about each other and better understandings of each other’s expertise.

• Make interactions meaningful and memorable.
• Consider having some face-to-face (or at least telephone) contact.
• Develop close relationships.

Promotes: benevolence and competence trust

4. Engage in collaborative communication People are more willing to trust someone who shows a willingness to listen and share; i.e., to get involved and talk things through. In contrast, people are wary of someone who seems closed and will only answer clear-cut questions or discuss complete solutions.

• Avoid being overly critical or judgmental of ideas still in their infancy.
• Don’t always demand complete solutions from people trying to solve a problem.
• Be willing to work with people to improve jointly on their partially formed ideas.

Promotes: benevolence and competence trust

5. Ensure that decisions are fair and transparent People take their cues from the larger environment. As a result, there is a “trickle down” effect for trust, where the way management treats people leads to a situation where employees treat one another similarly. Thus, fair and transparent decisions on personnel matters translate into a more trusting environment among everyone.

• Make sure that people know how and why personnel rules are applied and that the rules are applied equally.
• Make promotion and rewards criteria clear-cut, so people don’t waste time developing a hidden agenda (or trying to decode everyone else’s).

Promotes: benevolence trust

Organizational Factors

6. Establish and ensure shared vision and language People who have similar goals and who think alike find it easier to form a closer bond and to understand one another’s communications and expertise.

• Set common goals early on.
• Look for opportunities to create common terminology and ways of thinking.
• Be on the lookout for misunderstandings due to differences in jargon or thought processes.

Promotes: benevolence and competence trust

7. Hold people accountable for trust To make trustworthy behavior become “how we do things here,” managers need to measure and reward it. Even if the measures are subjective, evaluating people’s trustworthiness sends a strong signal to everyone that trust is critical.

• Explicitly include measures of trustworthiness in performance evaluations.
• Resist the urge to reward high performers who are not trustworthy.
• Keep publicizing key values such as trust-highlighting both rewarded good examples and punished violations-in multiple forums.

Promotes: benevolence and competence trust

Relational Factors

8. Create personal connections When two people share information about their personal lives, especially about similarities, then a stronger bond and greater trust develop. Non-work connections make a person seem more “real” and human, and thus more trustworthy.

• Create a “human connection” with someone based on non-work things you have in common.
• Maintain a quality connection when you do occasionally run into acquaintances, including discussing non-work topics.
• Don’t divulge personal information shared in confidence.

Promotes: benevolence trust

9. Give away something of value Giving trust and good faith to someone makes that person want to be trusting, loyal, and generous in return.

• When appropriate, take risks in sharing your expertise with people.
• Be willing to offer others your personal network of contacts when appropriate.

Promotes: benevolence trust

Individual Factors

10. Disclose your expertise and limitations Being candid about your limitations gives people confidence that they can trust what you say are your strengths. If you claim to know everything, then no one is sure when to believe you.

• Make clear both what you do and don’t know.
• Admit it when you don’t know something rather than posture to avoid embarrassment.
• Defer to people who know more than you do about a topic.

Promotes: competence trust

Conclusion

Without trust effective knowledge management is extremely difficult if not impossible. Leadership should be up to the task of nurturing trust in their departments or organizations in order to ensure effective communication between their staff. The ten points listed in this article provide a concrete framework of doing so.

This blogpost is partly an adaptation of the following article. We strongly advice you to read this whole article, since it goes more into depth than this post:

Abrams L., Cross R., Lesser E., and Levin D.Z. (2003) Nurturing interpersonal trust in knowledge-sharing networks Academy of Management Executive, 2003, Vol. 17, No. 4

In our true guru series we wanted to share Seth Godin. He is an entrepreneur and blogger who thinks about the marketing of ideas in the digital age.

While his story looks to his concept of “tribes” from a marketing point-of-view we think this is also relevant voor nuturing knowledge management behavior (see the invitation for discussion at the end).

We apologize if you don’t have sufficient bandwidth to view the video, unfortunately there is not much we can do about that. You can try to download this one on www.ted.com. We’ve listed the most important quotes according to us here below.

“What do we do for a living? What exactly to the people watching this do every day? I want to argue that what we do is we try to change everything. That we try to find a piece of the status quo, something that bothers us, something that needs to be improved, Something that is itching to be changed, and we change it. We try to make big, permanent, important change. But we don’t think about it that way. And we haven’t spent a lot of time talking about what that process is like. And I’ve been studying it for a couple years. And I want to share a couple stories with you today.”

“I think about ideas. And I think about the idea that creating an idea, spreading an idea has a lot behind it. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a Jewish wedding. But what they do is they take a light bulb and they smash it. Now there is a bunch of reasons for that, and stories about it. But one reason is because it indicates a change, from before to after. It is a moment in time.’

“And I want to argue that we are living through and are right at the key moment of a change in the way ideas are created and spread and implemented.”

“We started with the factory idea. That you could change the whole world if you had an efficient factory that could churn out change. We then went to the TV idea. That said if you had a big enough mouthpiece, if you could get on TV enough times, if you could buy enough ads, you could win. And now we’re in this new model of leadership.”

“Where the way we make change is not by using money, or power to lever a system. But by leading.”

‘So let me tell you about the three cycles. The first one is the factory cycle. Henry Ford comes up with a really cool idea. It enables him to hire men who used to get paid 50 cents a day and pay them five dollars a day. Because he’s got an efficient enough factory. Well with that sort of advantage you can churn out a lot of cars. You can make a lot of change. You can get roads built. You can change the fabric of an entire country. That the essence of what you’re doing is you need ever cheaper labor,and ever faster machines. And the problem we’ve run into is we’re running out of both. Ever cheaper labor and ever faster machines. ”

“But there is good news around the corner, really good news. I call it the idea of tribes. What tribes are, is a very simple concept that goes back 50 thousand years. It’s about leading and connecting people and ideas. And it’s something that people have wanted forever. Lots of people are used to having a spiritual tribe, or a church tribe, having a work tribe, having a community tribe. But now, thanks to the internet, thanks to the explosion of mass media, thanks to a lot of other things that are bubbling through our society around the world,tribes are everywhere.”

“You know the pirate tribe is a fascinating one.They’ve got their own flag. They’ve got the eyepatches. You can tell when you’re running into someone in a tribe. And it turns out that it’s tribes,not money, not factories, that can change our world, that can change politics, that can align large numbers of people. Not because you force them to do something against their will. But because they wanted to connect.”

“That what we do for a living now, all of us, I think, is find something worth changing, and then assemble tribes that assemble tribes that spread the idea and spread the idea. And it becomes something far bigger than ourselves. It becomes a movement. So when Al Gore set out to change the world again, he didn’t do it by himself. And he didn’t do it by buying a lot of ads. He did it by creating a movement. Thousands of people around the country who could give his presentation for him.Because he can’t be in 100 or 200 or 500 cities in each night.”

“You don’t need everyone. What Kevin Kelley has taught us is you just need, I don’t know, a thousand true fans. A thousand people who care enough that they will get you the next round and the next round and the next round. And that means that the idea you create, the product you create, the movement you create isn’t for everyone. It’s not a mass thing. That’s not what this is about. What it’s about instead is finding the true believers. It’s easy to look at what I’ve said so far, and say, “Wait a minute, I don’t have what it takes to be that kind of leader.”

“So three questions I’d offer you. The first one is, who exactly are you upsetting? Because if you’re not upsetting anyone, you’re not changing the status quo. The second question is, who are you connecting? Because for a lot of people, that’s what they’re in it for. The connections that are being made, one to the other. And the third one is, who are you leading? Because focusing on that part of it, not the mechanics of what you’re building,but the who, and the leading part is where change comes.”

“You don’t need permission from people to lead them. But in case you do, here it is. They’re waiting, we’re waiting for you to show us where to go next.So here is what leaders have in common. The first thing is, they challenge the status quo. They challenge what’s currently there. The second thing is, they build a culture. A secret language, a seven second handshake. A way of knowing that you’re in or out. They have curiosity. Curiosity about people in the tribe. Curiosity about outsiders. They’re asking questions. They connect people to one another. Do you know what people want more than anything? They want to be missed. They want to be missed the day they don’t show up. They want to be missed when they’re gone. And tribe leaders can do that. It’s fascinating because all tribe leaders have charisma. But you don’t need charisma to become a leader. Being a leader gives you charisma.

If you look and study the leaders who have succeeded, that’s where charisma comes from, from the leading. Finally, they commit. They commit to the cause. They commit to the tribe. They commit to the people who are there.”

Why do we consider Seth Godin a true guru?

Seth Godin is an extraordinary good speaker with original ideas about the digital world we live in right now. His ideas of tribes intruiged us, when looking at it from a knowledge management perspective. Tribes might be effective ‘pseudo-organizational forms’  that facilitate knowledge sharing and that spur possibilities for original thinking and innovation. We have formulated a few questions that we would like to pose to you:

• How do you think knowledge leadership can tap into this concept of tribes most effectively?
• Could knowledge leadership also attract knowledge from other sources than their own organization, supporting their own organizational goals, by using this concept of tribes? And how could leadership do this? What would be the preconditions?

If you have ideas to share with us, please do not hesitate to submit it in a comment.

In this theory of the week we focus on the Big Five Theory of Personality.  They are five broad factors or dimensions of personality developed through lexical analysis. This model is considered to be the most comprehensive empirical or data-driven inquiry into personality.

Introduction

The Big Five Model of Personality consists of a cluster of more specific traits that correlate together. The Big Five factors and their constituent traits can be summarized as follows:

• Openness – appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, curiosity, and variety of experience.
• Conscientiousness – a tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; planned rather than spontaneous behavior.
• Extraversion – energy, positive emotions, surgency, and the tendency to seek stimulation and the company of others.
• Agreeableness – a tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others.
• Neuroticism – a tendency to experience unpleasant emotions easily, such as anger, anxiety, depression, or vulnerability; sometimes called emotional instability.

There has been a lot of research focused at looking at the effects of these traits on organizational performance, and also more specifically to knowledge management. This research has shown that two of the five factors influenced knowledge behavior: Openness and Extraversion.

Openness and Knowledge Behavior

Openness involves active imagination, aesthetic sensitivity, attentiveness to inner feelings, preference for variety, and intellectual curiosity. People who score low on openness are considered closed to experience. They tend to be conventional and traditional in their outlook and behavior. They prefer familiar routines to new experiences, and generally have a narrower range of interests. They could be considered practical and down to earth (Costa & McCrae, 1992).

Openness to Experience was found to have a significant relationship with individual engagement to share knowledge in organizations (Cabrera, Collins & Salgado, 2006). In other studies its also associated with training proficiency, and the capacity to better cope with change (Barrick & Mount, 1991). Both these characteristics are also of influence when implementing something new like a knowledge management strategy.

Extraversion and Knowledge Behavior

Extraversion is “the act, state, or habit of being predominantly concerned with and obtaining gratification from what is outside the self”. Costa & McCrae (1992) found that ‘People who are extraverted enjoy being around and interacting with others…’. Extraverts tend to enjoy human interactions and to be enthusiastic, talkative, assertive, and gregarious. They take pleasure in activities that involve large social gatherings, such as parties, community activities, public demonstrations, and business or political groups. An extraverted person is likely to enjoy time spent with people and find less reward in time spent alone. Extraversion has been found to be related to job performance in occupations where interactions with others are a significant portion of the job (Ashton, 1998). Furthermore, if working in a team, higher scores on extraversion would be expected to be related to more effective teamwork (Barrick & Mount, 1991). It also seemed to have a positive effect on performance levels in knowledge sharing and performance in training (Cabrera, Collins & Salgado, 2006).

How to focus on personality in knowledge processes

The awareness that the amount of activity in knowledge behavior can partly be explained by a person’s personality is important for knowledge leadership. If someone has a closed to experience outlook in life, they might not be as active as those that are more open in searching for new knowledge or experiences for example. That does not mean that this person find it more difficult or less valuable. It’s just the way they do it. The same counts for extraversion. An introverted personality might have a hard time sharing knowledge face-to-face or in group discussions.  That does not mean that they don’t think knowledge sharing is important or that they don’t have anything useful to say. In both cases it’s the personality setup of the individual that partly explains their (lack of) behavior. Changing someone’s personality is one of the most difficult things to do, if not impossible. Some people need a different way of motivating them to become active.

If you want your staff to have the best personalities for the most flourishing knowledge management culture, attention can be given to personality in the recruitment and selection of new employees. Psychological tests can give some insights in the psychological nature of the candidates and give some direction in assessing whether or not they are internally inclined to be active in knowledge processes. However, such a test should be done by someone qualified to do so, ensuring a sound analysis of the results. And the results of such an psychological assessment do not lead to universal truths. But as an element in the recruitment and selection process it is usable to help selecting the right staff if knowledge management is a number 1 priority.

Conclusion

The psychological make-up of the staff in your organizations  has shown to influence knowledge behavior. Awareness of this influence can help in making the right attribution and taking the right approach in stimulating knowledge behavior.

If you think the personalities of the people in your organization should be best fit to for a culture of sharing and seeking then giving attention to this in recruiting and selecting such individuals could be an option.

We are in the middle of writing articles about our research, which is a painstaking process costing a lot of time. Who said writing and publishing was easy?! The posting frequency on this site has therefore been a little lower than what we strive for.In the future this will change: keep posted!

We would like to share the main reasons we chose to research the human factor in knowledge processes in this article. It has an focus on international development, but might also prove to be interesting for other sectors: you decide!

Background

In my work for MDF-Training & Consultancy I got more and more involved in knowledge management. I realized its enormous potential, propably just like many of you already have. Especially in International Development, where we all strive to attain the same goals in the end, getting rid of poverty, knowledge management seems a good answer to share good practices and not reinventing the wheel. With such big international organizations working as an umbrella over more local ones, it provides big opportunities. So it’s no wonder that Knowledge Management is a big issue in this sector.

Since the pivotal report “Knowledge for Development” of the World Bank, most other development agencies have taken steps in adopting some sort of knowledge management strategy, though approaches have varied quite widely, as has the terminology used, and the levels of investment made (Barnard, 2003). Overall, the promise and potential of these initiatives, as with the overall ‘Knowledge for Development’ movement is yet to be fully realized. Clearly, the knowledge ad learning approach can and does provide useful tools and approaches, which, if properly, consistently and thoughtfully applied, can help address some of the symptoms of the institutional malaise faced by modern development organizations (Ramalingam, 2005).

But what he also states is that “Major challenges of knowledge and learning in the development sector still need to be addressed” The centrality of knowledge to development strategies is not recognized or, if it is, not acted upon: “even in those organizations where knowledge is central to the overall mission, systematic knowledge-based approaches are not widely accepted and applied (Ramalignam, 2005).

What has tended to happen in development is that organizations have generally leaned towards linear and technocentric interpretations of KM, more in line with the descriptive early traditions of knowledge management and organizational development or ‘institution building’ (Hovland, 2003)

The Human Factor in Knowledge Management

Careful attention is needed to the processes by which values and purpose are defined and articulated so as to create an enabling environment for knowledge management to succeed. Without these processes, organizational learning and knowledge management merely become toolkits and methodologies in a vacuum (Pasteur et al., 2006). There is also a need to better understand how knowledge and learning may practically address and deal with issues of personality, culture, language, religion, and so on (Ramalingam 2005).

As Davenport and Prusak (1998) put it: “Effective knowledge management cannot take place without extensive behavioral, cultural and organizational change (…) Technology alone won’t make a person with expertise share with others. Technology alone won’t get an employee who is uninterested in seeking knowledge to hop onto a keyboard and searching or browsing.”

Knowledge management is first and foremost a people issue. Does the culture of your organization support ongoing learning and knowledge sharing? Are people motivated and rewarded for creating, sharing and using knowledge? Is there a culture of openness and mutual respect and support? Or is your organization very hierarchical where ‘knowledge is power’ and so people are reluctant to share? Are people under constant pressure to act with no time for knowledge-seeking or reflection? Do they feel inspired to innovate and learn from mistakes, or is there a strong ‘blame and shame’ culture? These questions are essential to ask and to solve. There is a need to further understand the reasons why people engage in knowledge sharing behavior. This study tries to provide some answers.

The research on ‘the human factor in knowledge processes‘ tries to shine a light on the human factors that promote or impede effective behavior of people within different knowledge processes. By taking a multi-cultural focus it wants to provide a cross-section of the world we live in. And on this site you’ll find a diverse overview of relevant psychological theories that are translated to the specific world of knowledge management in development settings. This site publishes some main outcomes of this cross-cultural study. Finally it also gives recommendations how to make the human factor flourish in your organizations.

However, we would also really like your input and experiences in unraveling this people factor in knowledge management. We look forward to sharing and discussing strategies and practice with you. For in the end: together, we know more!

This article was only a short overview on the reasons why we chose to research the human factor in knowledge processes. A more extensive overview on the current state of knowledge in development will follow later. Meanwhile the articles presented here below provide an excellent starting point to read about the current state of affairs of KM in International Development. If you want to become active in the KM4DEV movement, you can visit this community.

References

Barnard, G. (2003) Knowledge sharing in development agencies: knowledge fortress or knowledge pool? Information Development. 19, 4, 280-288.

Davenport & Prusak ( 2000) “Working Knowledge” Harvard Business School Press; 2nd edition

Hovland, I. (2003) Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning: An International Development Perspective Working Paper 224 Overseas Development Institute, London.

Pasteur, K., Pettit, J. & Schagen, B. Van (2006) Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning for Development KM4Dev Workshop 2006 Background Paper Institute of Development Studies

Ramalingam, B. (2005) Implementing knowledge strategies: lessons from international development agencies Working Paper 244 Overseas Development Institute, London.

Worldbank (1998) World Development Report – Knowledge for Development

This week we present a new section: “our world”. Here we re-publish all kinds of statistics  about the world we live in presented in innovative ways. We hope you like this section.

Some statistics are just mind-boggling. This fantastic video embedded below is about population growth, the rise of India and China (a changing world order) and the progression of Information Technology in the world. It is researched by Karl Fish, Scott McLeod and Jeff Bronman, remixed. Just amazing! The music is kind of loud, although we like it , you might want to turn the volume down a bit.

• What does this mean for the effective management of organizations in this rapidly changing world?
  
• What does this mean for 21st century knowledge management?

We would love to hear your ideas! Please feel free to add your vision in a comment. Together we know more!

We pick up the results of the research again in this post about the general outcomes of the study towards human behavior in knowledge processes. First we introduce how we came to the specific questions we used in our research by introducing the Knowledge Management Framework. Then the general results of the study follow; separated for the two sexes.

Introduction

There are many books written on knowledge management and the authors have come up with an enourmous amount of knowledge management frameworks [Browse through examples here]. Some are deceptively simple, others extremely difficult to grasp. The one we find most useful is the very practical model of Collison and Parcell taken from their great book “Learning to Fly”.

Adapted from Collison and Parcell (2004)

We recommend reading this book to fully understand this generative model. There is a summary available through their via their website. According to their model the knowledge management process consists of the following steps [very short outline]:

• People and teams agree on certain objectives. Organization-wide this is the mission and strategy, but on a smaller scale they could be developing a certain policy or building a specific house for instance.
• When people start performing the activities needed to attain the goals they set, they should enter the “knowledge circle”.  Before the team starts a task they could search for experiences with others that did the same assignment once. This promotes learning and prevents people from reinventing the wheel in certain circumstances. During and after the activities reflection on the attained results thusfar and checking with other sources of knowledge might lead to valuable learning opportunities.
• All these learning activities should be connected to some sort of knowledg ebank. If you want to learn before you act, you can withdraw knowledge from this source. If you want to contribute, you will have to submit your knowledge somewhere.
• However, it is not possible to capture all knowledge necesarry and available. Therefore it is important to let your team connect with some sort of network of people that have the required knowledge and experience ready to be tapped.
• Finally the environment or culture of the organization surrounds the model, which is critical to strat and support behavior in knowledge processes.

This model can be applied as follows:

• Preventing wheel reinvention, praticularly in large international organizations
• Accelerating the integration process following an aquisition or merger
• Identifying, capturing and sharing good practice in organizations
• Dealing with cultural barriers that hold back organizations
• To build, nurture and support networks and CoPs
• Creating a culture of continuous improvement and learning
• Involving leadership in the right behaviors to reinforce knowledge-sharing

We have used this model as a framework for our research, since we think it is practical, simple and complete.

Measuring behavior in knowledge processes

In our research we used the following questions to measure behavior in knowledge processes, extracted from the above mentioned model:

• How often do you actively search for prior experiences within your organization before you start a new assignment?
• When you start a new assignment, how often do you actively search for relevant information from outside your organization?
• How often do you thoroughly reflect on your goals, results, and the process when you finish an assignment?
• How often do you formulate learned lessons into a document that is shared within your organization?
• How often are you active in sharing and discussing lessons learned with people from other organizations?
• How often do you actively participate in a group which is focused at sharing work experiences?

All questions where preceded with a short elaboration of the decribed situation.

Results of the research

The research showed the following results:

As you can see in this graph, there is no significant difference between men and women.  Women tend to score a little bit higher on searching for information prior to their tasks, while men score a bit higher on the other four activities, but he differences are very small.

It is interesting to look at the reported frequencies of the knowledge management behavior. When searching for knowledge prior to an assignment searching outside of the organization scored higher than searching inside the organization. We are in the process of further analysing this difference. According to the research people do reflect on their activities, but formulating them into a document, and thus contributing to the above mentioned knowledge bank, scores a lit lower. The same accounts for sharing and discussing lessons learned with other organizations. Not surprisingly the non-profit staff scored higher here than the group of people from the private sector. Finally, though the amount of communication methods have vastly increased over the last years, the participants of the research are not yet using them to the fullest. Futher research is needed what methods and instruments they use and how they use them.

Conclusion

Looking at the reported frequencies there is no significant difference between women and men when it comes to behavior in knowledge processes. Searching outside the organization scores a little bit higher than search for knowledge inside the organization prior to an assignment. People often reflect after their assignment, but the lessons they learn get captured less frequent into a knowlege bank. Despite of the emergence of social media, being part of a community of practice is not yet the common standard.

These are very general outcomes that we presented just to share how we developed our questions. In the coming weeks we will digg into the data and elaborate on more specific relations between KM behavior and a lot of different predictors.

Keep posted!

Thanks to the beauty of the internet we come across various inspirational people that have a great impact on our thinking and approach. We share some of those presentations in our section: “true gurus”. We have also included citations from the videos. We will always finish with a reflection on the connection for knowledge management and research.

This talk is from Sir Ken Robinson. It’s mainly about how almost all education systems in the world have an adverse effect on the creative capacity of their students. Sir Robinson also makes a striking remark on the way we run our companies.

We apologize if you don’t have sufficient bandwidth to view the video, unfortunately there is not much we can do about that. You can try to download this one on www.ted.com. We’ve listed the most important quotes according to us here below.

“There have been three themes, haven’t there, running through the conference (red: Sir Ken Robinson held his talk at the prestigious TED conference) , which are relevant to what I want to talk about. One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that we’ve had and in all of the people here. Just the variety of it and the range of it. The second is that it’s put us in a place where we have no idea what’s going to happen, in terms of the future. No idea how this may play out.”

“I have an interest in education — actually, what I find is everybody has an interest in education. (…) We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it’s education that’s meant to take us into this future that we can’t grasp. If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue — despite all the expertise that’s been on parade for the past four days — what the world will look like in five years’ time. And yet we’re meant to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary. And the third part of this is that we’ve all agreed, nonetheless, on the really extraordinary capacities that children have – (…) So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity.”

“My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.”

(…) kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. Am I right? They’re not frightened of being wrong. Now, I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. (…) And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.

“And we run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes.”

“We’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. The result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this: he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately: that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it. So why is this?”

“If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say “What’s it for, public education?” I think you’d have to conclude — if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everyone that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners — I think you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn’t it? They’re the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there. (Laughter) And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn’t hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement.”

“If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can’t afford to go on that way.”

“In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. More people, and it’s the combination of all the things we’ve talked about — technology and its transformation effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population. Suddenly, degrees aren’t worth anything. Isn’t that true?  But now (…) you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It’s a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of educatio is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.”

“What I think it comes to is this: (…) I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won’t serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children.”

“There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, “If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.” And he’s right.”

“What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely, and that we avert some of the scenarios that we’ve talked about. And the only way we’ll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are, and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future. By the way — we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it.”

Why do we consider Sir Ken Robinson a true guru?

First things first: WOW! What an amazing presentation. It really made us think long and hard, starting with our own educational histories. And he is funny too! His presentation was not primarily about knowledge management or organizational learning, but it does contain crucial ideas and thinking on how to foster creativity, and the fundamental flaws in our education systems.

His comment on how we run our companies intrigued us the most. This topic will be one of our focal points in the coming months. When our knowledge market opens, we will start a discussion on this, inviting you all to participate.

Until then, if you already have some ideas, we would like to ask you to react on this video through a comment.

• How do you see the relation between stigmatizing mistakes and the hinderance of the staff’s creativity?
• And how do we make sure that the people in our organizations use their creative potential to the fullest in order to reach the best outcomes?

We are very interested in your ideas on this topic, and we are working on our own answers based on experience and scientific research.

In this post we are publishing the results we found researching the influence that the size of an organization has on the reported knowledge sharing and seeking behavior of their staff.

Introduction

“Generally, any new management philosophy and technology are first implemented in large organizations and KM is no exception in this regard.  Much of the seminal work on KM, features large multinational companies. However knowledge Management not only helps big organizations, but also provides benefits to small and medium scale companies.” (Sanghani, 2008)

It is therefore interesting to investigate possible differences when it comes to the size of the organization. There has been some earlier research towards this topic, which showed:

“(..) “organizational size” did not have any effect on the ‘initiation’ and ‘use behaviour’ of KMS.” A possible explanation, according to the researchers, is that “the competitive pressure has forced every business and organization practice knowledge management even though there are some differences in format, extent, complexity, advances, and experience of their knowledge management activities.” (Quaddus & Xu, 2007)

Results of the Research

Our research “The Human Factor in Knowledge Processes” investigated the organizational sizes of the participants. We compared the size to the amount of reported knowledge management behavior.
[For the research demographics click here]

Looking at this graph, there is no real difference between the different organizational sizes and the reported knowledge behavior. This is in line with the earlier findings of Quaddus and Xu. The small organizations reported a lower score at some of the activities, but the error margin was too high to conclude that this is due to their size.

The tendency worth mentioning is the drop in searching for knowledge outside the organization when the organizations are  big: 2500+. Such a tendency is dangerous, because it might lead to inward focused organizations, so-called “knowledge fortresses” (Barnard, 2003), which might have considerable negative effects on the longer term. We will dedicate a post on this in the near future.

Conclusion

This research showed no real significant differences between the organizational size and reported behavior in knowledge processes. This finding supports earlier research on this subject. Size does not seem to play a role in the frequency of knowledge management related practices, not any more in 2009 at least.

If you have other experiences in real-life situations, or if you underline these findings, please feel free to comment.

Thanks to the beauty of the internet we come across various inspirational people that have a great impact on our thinking and approach. We will share some of these presentations here in our new section: “true gurus”. We have also included citations from the videos. We will always finish with a reflection on the connection for knowledge management and research.

This talk is from Hans Rosling from Gapminder. It’s about the economical and humanitarian change in the world  over the last hundred years and the importance of free statistics.

We apologize if you don’t have sufficient bandwidth to view the video, unfortunately there is not much we can do about that. You can try to download this one on www.ted.com. We’ve listed the most important quotes according to us here below.

“I asked them,  “What do you really think about the world?” (…) And they said, “The world is still ‘we’ and ‘them.’  And “we” is Western world and “them” is Third World.”  “And what do you mean with Western world?” I said.  “Well, that’s long life and small family, and Third World is short life and large family.” “The problem (…) was not ignorance: it was preconceived ideas”

[You can watch the video here below]

“Let me make a comparison directly between the United States of America and Vietnam. 1964: America had small families and long life; Vietnam had large families and short lives. And this is what happens: the data during the war indicate that even with all the death, there was an improvement of life expectancy. By the end of the year, the family planning started in Vietnam and they went for smaller families. And the United States up there is getting for longer life, keeping family size. And in the ’80s now, they give up communist planning and they go for market economy, and it moves faster even than social life. And today, we have in Vietnam the same life expectancy and the same family size here in Vietnam, 2003, as in United States, 1974, by the end of the war. I think we all — if we don’t look in the data — we underestimate the tremendous change in Asia, which was in social change before we saw the economical change.”

“We will not have a divided world. We’ll have most people in the middle.”

“It’s a tremendous variation within Africa which we rarely often make — that it’s equal everything. I can split South Asia here(…) huge difference between Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. I can split Arab states. (…) Same climate, same culture, same religion. Huge difference. Even between neighbors. Yemen, civil war. United Arab Emirate, money which was quite equally and well used.”

“We’ve got a much more mainstream appearance of the world, where all countries tend to use their money better than they used in the past.” “Now that’s dangerous, to use average data, because there is such a lot of difference within countries.”

“The 20 percent poorest of Niger is out here, and the 20 percent richest of South Africa is there, and yet we tend to discuss on what solutions there should be in Africa. Everything in this world exists in Africa. And you can’t discuss universal access to HIV [medicine] for that quintile up here with the same strategy as down here. The improvement of the world must be highly contextualized, and it’s not relevant to have it on regional level. We must be much more detailed.”

“And even more policy makers and the corporate sectors would like to see how the world is changing. Now, why doesn’t this take place? Why are we not using the data we have? We have data in the United Nations, in the national statistical agencies and in universities and other non-governmental organizations. Because the data is hidden down in the databases. And the public is there, and the Internet is there, but we have still not used it effectively.”

“All that information we saw changing in the world does not include publicly-funded statistics. There are some web pages like this, you know, but they take some nourishment down from the databases, but people put prices on them, stupid passwords and boring statistics.”

“And this won’t work. So what is needed? We have the databases. It’s not the new database you need. (…) Some countries accept that their databases can go out on the world, but what we really need is, of course, a search function. A search function where we can copy the data up to a searchable format and get it out in the world. And what do we hear when we go around? I’ve done anthropology on the main statistical units. Everyone says, “It’s impossible. This can’t be done. Our information is so peculiar in detail, so that cannot be searched as others can be searched. We cannot give the data free to the students, free to the entrepreneurs of the world. ” But this is what we would like to see, isn’t it? The publicly-funded data is down here. And we would like flowers to grow out on the Net. And one of the crucial points is to make them searchable, and then people can use the different design tool to animate it there.”

“So we can see a lot happening in data in the coming years. We will be able to look at income distributions in completely new ways.” “The thing would be to get up the databases free, to get them searchable, and with a second click, to get them into the graphic formats, where you can instantly understand them.”

Why do we consider Hans Rosling to be a “true guru”?

The talk speaks for itself, so there is not much to add. We at weknowmore.org also underline the use of valid statistical data to form a factual image of the world. We adopt the same approach. Science and effectively sharing knowledge can bring us more insights and better approaches to deal with the world’s problems. So we also strongly support the open research’ ideology.
Together we know more!

Hans Rosling is a doctor and researcher, Hans Rosling identified a new paralytic disease induced by hunger in rural Africa. Now the global health professor is looking at the bigger picture, increasing our understanding of social and economic development with the remarkable trend-revealing software he created.

Gapminder is a non-profit venture promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels. www.gapminder.org

What do you think about the topic this presentation from Hans Rosling? We invite you to give your reaction through a comment.