In this section a wide variety of attitudes about learning enablers as well as some hindrance factors will be explored. The section will show that the most important enabling factors are trust, communication, motive, and openness. In addition, culture of the organization must support learning by enabling knowledge sharing. Different organizational conditions are
61 mentioned by many authors like Ichijo et al.(1998) and Nonaka et al.(1995). There will also be an interesting association between knowledge and networking enablers.
Knowledge would not be created, captured and capitalized on in firms without its intentional development by means of knowledge enablers. Knowledge development in organizations should not be left unintentional. Otherwise, knowledge development will occur at random and will be unsystematic since knowledge is very fragile. To develop knowledge capital as one of its core competences, a firm should have knowledge enablers. Here knowledge enablers are defined as organizational mechanisms for intentionally developing knowledge in organizations. (Ichijo et al., 1998)
Knowledge enablers have three significant roles. First, knowledge enablers should stimulate individual knowledge development. Individual organizational members should develop their range of activities so that they will have a variety of experiences, which will be sources for individual knowledge development. Second, knowledge enablers should protect knowledge development in organizations, tackling obstacles to its existing in organizations. Since knowledge is very fragile, it would not be nurtured in organizations without intentional facilitation and protection. Knowledge enablers are expected to play this facilitation and protection role. Third, knowledge enablers should facilitate the sharing of individual knowledge and experience among organizational members so that individual knowledge will be transformed into organizational knowledge. In the following, each five knowledge enablers of Ichijo et al. (1998) will be introduced and its function will be explained. (Ichijo et al., 1998)
1. Creating knowledge intent. Organizational members individually as well as collectively have a variety of experiences. These individual or collective experiences are shared by other organizational members, who collectively interpret these experiences, reason the truth behind these experiences, justify this truth, referring to corporate values as justification criteria for organizational activities, and thus finally develop organizational knowledge.
2. Developing organizational conversations. If an individual organizational member creates new knowledge, there might be no legitimate language in which this knowledge can be expressed. Therefore firms should focus on the role of language played in knowledge creation, and find the way to facilitate languaging (von Krogh et al., 1995, 1996) in firms and to use language, which will be commonly shared and understood by organizational members.
3. Developing organizational structure facilitating knowledge development. The context for knowledge creation is where firms can accomplish innovation by means of creating,
62 capturing and capitalizing of their knowledge asset. Firms’ structures should be organized so that they are close to the context for knowledge and are able to act for knowledge creation. Firms should know where they can accomplish a unique contribution to customers, actually penetrate into this context, be close to their customers and work with them so that knowledge will be created, captured or capitalized on. Firms should also have such mechanisms by which a variety of information and interpretation will be facilitated among their members due to the general conclusion that integrating a variety of information and its interpretations is beneficial for groups engaged in complex problem solving. In order to develop organizational knowledge in a turbulent environment, firms should have a variety of information sources, a variety of interpretation of this information, and a variety of perspectives developed from a variety of interpretation. Given this variety, the range of organizational activities will be enlarged and this wide range of activities will increase the possibility of developing organizational knowledge. Once it is shared among organizational members, a variety of information and interpretation will stimulate creativity among them, thus facilitating organizational knowledge development.
4. Managing care relationships. Tacit knowledge as a crucial source of innovation exists in individuals, groups or organizations in the form of individual experiences, images, skills, organizational culture, and organizational climate and so on. Therefore, in order to comprehend certain tacit knowledge, interactions between individuals are prerequisite. What underlies such interactions is independent, all-out commitment to the subject concern. Such commitment nurtures mutual trust, which facilitates constant, quality dialogue and discussions. Knowledge development is fraught with emotions, misunderstandings, misconceptions, rule-based entrapping etc. Mutually respective relationships must exist among members of firms since organizational knowledge creation is a social process. Care characterizes a process of interaction between receiver and provider in firms, and should be understood as a quality of a relationship rather than in terms of roles and functions. When this relationship based on care is realized among organizational members, trust will emerge among people. This trust improves the quality of dialogue and discussion as a basis for organizational activities, and thus facilitates the sharing of tacit knowledge.
5. Developing knowledge managers. Those managers who value knowledge and its management (i.e. creation, capturing, and capitalizing on knowledge capital) must be intentionally developed. The way they are developed should be consistent with
63 knowledge development and management. The evaluation of those managers who actively penetrate into the context for knowledge creation, collect various information, interpret it, share this information and interpretation with other colleagues, establish care relationship, and thus contribute to developing knowledge-based competence in the firm should be built in the incentive system. (Ichijo et al., 1998)
The enabling conditions that are connected to the Nonaka and Takeuchi’s knowledge spiral are intention, autonomy, redundancy, creative chaos, and requisite variety (Nonaka et al., 1995, 2000). These enabling conditions are the driving forces for dynamic knowledge conversion.
The knowledge spiral is driven by organizational intention, which is defined as an organization’s efforts to its goal. These efforts are included in the business strategy. From the organizational knowledge creation point of view, the essence of strategy lies in developing the organizational capability to acquire, create, accumulate, and exploit knowledge. Business organization should foster their employees’ commitment by formulating an organizational intention and proposing it to them in order to create knowledge.
All members of an organization should be allowed to act autonomously, also at the individual level. Autonomy increases the possibility that individuals will motivate themselves to create new knowledge. Original ideas emanate from autonomous individuals, diffuse within the team, and then become organizational ideas. A knowledge-creating organization that secures autonomy may also be described as an “autopoietic system” (Maturana et al., 1992). Similarly to an autopoietic system, autonomous individuals and groups in knowledge-creating organizations set their task boundaries by themselves to pursue the ultimate goal expressed in the higher intention of the organization.
Redundancy, the third condition, may sound pernicious because of its connotations of unnecessary duplication, waste or information overloaded. However, the meaning here is the existence of information that goes beyond the immediate operational requirements of organizational members. In business organizations, redundancy refers to intentional overlapping of information about business activities, management responsibilities, and the company as a whole. A concept created by an individual or a group is shared by other individuals who may not need the concept immediately. Sharing redundant information promotes the sharing of tacit knowledge, because individuals can sense what others are trying to articulate. Therefore, redundancy speeds up the knowledge-creating process.
Creative chaos and fluctuation stimulate the interaction between the organization and the external environment. Fluctuation is considered as an order whose pattern is hard to predict at the beginning. When organizations adopt an open attitude toward environmental signals, they
64 can exploit those signals’ ambiguity, redundancy, or noise in order to improve their own knowledge system. When there is fluctuation in an organization, its members face “breakdown” of routines habits, or cognitive frameworks, which offers them an opportunity to reconsider their fundamental thinking and perspective. The breakdown demands that the attention is turned to dialogue as a means of social interaction, thus helping us to create new concepts. An environmental fluctuation triggers a breakdown within the organization and the new knowledge will be created. This phenomenon is also called creative chaos.
According to Ashby (Nonaka et al., 1995), an organization’s internal diversity must match the variety and complexity of the environment in order to deal with challenges posed by the environment. Members of organization can cope with many contingencies if they possess requisite variety, which can be enhanced by combining information differently, flexibly, and quickly, and by providing equal access to information throughout the organization. In maximizing variety, everyone in the organization needs to be assured of the fastest access to the broadest variety of necessary information.
Aadne et al. (1996) write about knowledge and cooperative strategies. They mention at least four issues being of substantial importance for understanding and managing knowledge transfer based on literature review: motives, openness, prior experience, and internalizing. When examining the issues deeper, it is quite obvious that those issues are important factors also in benchmarking process.
From the benchmarking point of view, understanding of both the company’s own motives and the motives of potential partner is utmost important. The motives have impact on the choice of potential partner as well in cooperative strategic activities as in benchmarking activities, which may be strategic, too. Kogut (1988) mentions three different types of motives for joint ventures: transaction costs, competitive positioning, and organizational learning. Recently, a stronger emphasis on knowledge and learning motives has become dominant (Aadne et al., 1996). Hamel (1991) argues that knowledge transfer is rare when a clearly communicated learning motive is lacking.
A knowledge transfer motive is emphasized in the literature as a basic requirement for any learning to take place in cooperative activities. However, even if a company has a clearly defined and communicated learning motive, the potential for learning is highly determined by the openness of the partner (Hamel, 1991). So, openness can be seen as willingness to share knowledge, and to interact closely with a partner. Learning from past experience by transforming experiences into useful knowledge is a fundamental key for successful companies.
65 Diversity of knowledge is seen as a robust for learning, because it enhances the probability that incoming information may relate to what is already known (Cohen et al., 1990).
Given that motive is the desire or willingness to learn, and openness is the opportunity to learn, internalization is concerned with, or determines, the partners’ ability or capacity to learn (Hamel, 1991). This part of the knowledge transfer process may be divided into two aspects; receptivity and dissemination. This distinction is used when describing the difference between individual learning and collective or shared learning (Aadne et al., 1996). Hamel (1991) experiences that the partner having the greatest need to learn has the highest barriers to receptivity. The problems occur in understanding what the partner is doing and also in understanding or tracing the process leading to the partner’s knowledge development. The same problem is seen between American and Japanese companies by Crossan et al. (1992). Hamel (1991) argues that the organization’s ability to absorb knowledge depends on both the process of altering existing perceptual maps and replacing old status quo behavior with new improved behavior. This argument describes clearly what the main idea in benchmarking process is, and at the same time makes these above-mentioned issues very relevant when designing benchmarking process in an organization. Hamel (1991) still goes on in describing the features of internalization when writing about distributing relevant knowledge throughout parent organization, and finally exploits its potential.
The corporate culture in learning organizations focuses more on liberating employees than on controlling them. Commonly these learning organizations encourage prudent risk taking, encourage holistic thinking, expect curiosity and creativity, encourage networking and teamwork, reward meaningful difference, and focus on transformational progress in addition to mere developmental change. (Bogan et al., 1994)
Goh (2002) writes about the factors influencing knowledge transfer and he mentions organizational culture as one of the enabling factors. One cultural dimension is cooperation and collaboration. Knowledge transfer requires the willingness of a group or individual to work with others and share knowledge to their mutual benefit. A fundamental variable in cooperation between groups or individuals is level of trust. A high level of trust is essential for a willingness to co-operate. Certain management practices can influence the level of trust in an organization. Open decisions offer widely available and accessible information for employees. In addition to co-operative climate, a need to foster a culture of problem seeking and problem solving improve knowledge transfer. Thus the culture can significantly increase the propensity of the organization’s members to share knowledge and information freely with each other. (Goh, 2002)
66 Spekman et al. (2002) concentrate especially on the learning process in supply chain and they list the affecting factors being: trust, communications, the type of relationship between partners in supply chain, decision-making style, and company’s culture.
In this section a wide variety of attitudes about learning enablers as well as some hindrance factors is explored. The most important enabling factors seem to be trust, communication, motive, and openness. Culture of the organization must support learning by enabling knowledge sharing. Different organizational conditions are mentioned by many authors like Ichijo et al. and Nonaka et al. (1995). Interestingly, many of the factors enabling learning and knowledge creation are exactly the same than enabling networking in supply chain context.