Safety, equality and modesty

These values are welcome and well-known in families or friendships, but are not always considered or highlighted to be important for an organisation. There are many organisations that ‘just work’ to create a defined turn over, and even when the top management or a founder considers such values to be important, they often are not

communicated and permanently shown to the employees. In this regard, the founder of the organisation under scrutiny established and supported different programs to highlight that the overall aim of the organisation is not to create a vast amount of turnover, but rather to put the employees at the centre and provide a setting of safety, equality, and modesty. As interviewee 29 mentioned, ‘profit is not everything for this company, we know that and this is very

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sympathetic’ (Original quote, ‘Also, der Profit ist nicht alles, das wissen wir und das ist auch sehr sympathisch’) (I29/Q35.2).

Growth and turnover are important for the ability to invest money into the organisation and employees and to provide a setting that allows for creativity and innovations.

Safety can be interpreted as having a safe job and not losing the job when something unexpected happens, for instance, when a disease strikes or one’s family needs help or a new baby arrives. In this regard, all employees get a lot of support from the organisation under scrutiny. A case example is that a male employee can take paternity leave when he becomes a father to be with his family to enjoy this amazing and new event. There are no discussions and no doubt about getting such breaks. Similarly, if employees have bad and long diseases, they need not be afraid of losing their job. As interviewee 6 perfectly explains, ‘certainly the employees are missing, but for the company it is important that this social component exist’

(Original quote, ‘Natürlich fehlen die Leute..., aber im Unternehmen ist es wichtig, dass auch diese soziale Komponente irgendwo Platz hat’) (I6/ Q7.2).

Safety is also a message sent to the employees, which not only means that man and life are considered important, but also that one can trust this organisation, because ‘having trust’ in their employees is not only a tagline.

Another value important to the founder of the organisation under scrutiny is equality.

Where equality does not exist, a strong hierarchy does, which leads to barriers, because one could divert one’s ideas and inner thoughts to make a career within this hierarchy. It reduces trust and makes sharing of ideas and explicit knowledge difficult. With respect to this, everyone in the organisation under scrutiny, irrespective of their position (the top

management, the secretary, or the cleaner), has the same possibilities. All resources, such as company cars, mini vans, the gym, relaxing rooms, and so forth, can be used and booked by

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all employees in the same way; there are no privileges, such as booked parking zones for the top management, and there are no bigger offices to show ones’ status or other benefits. For instance, the founder selected a room which was not so popular and five cms smaller than the other offices, as his office so that the more popular rooms (those with a balcony) are free for his employees (I27/Q33.5).

Modesty, also important to the founder, is closely linked to equality and possibly even is a result of equality or a trigger of equality. The founder’s values of equality and modesty have inspired the employees, as discussed earlier. The interviewees explained that man and life is much more valuable than the turnover for the founder. Therefore, the founder invests around 20% of the turnover yearly to develop the organisation and in this way gives back what the employees accomplished instead of enriching himself privately. The modesty of the founder enables ‘growth through own power’ so that the organisation can develop on its own;

he also puts the organisation’s well-being before his own. Hence, the employees automatically become the centre of the organisation (I9/Q10.5).

8.2.1.8 Environment.

One might question the importance of the introduced positive values for knowledge creation. They play a key role though these elements are not directly mentioned with regard to knowledge creation. The introduced elements allow establishing a positive environment where the employee is more valuable than the turnover of the organisation. In this regard, the literature review already showed that the environment of an organisation or its relative, namely ‘ba’, is important for knowledge creation. Von Krogh (2000) discussed Helmut Volkmann’s ‘Xenia – the knowledge city’, which exemplifies a city as an ideal place

(environment) that serves as a ‘meeting place for people’ (von Krogh et al., 2000, p. 169) for focussed knowledge creation. Despres and Chauvel (2000a) explained that ‘ba’ is ‘the space for dynamic knowledge conversion and emerging relationships’ (p. 60).

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As mentioned earlier, an organisational environment is not only defined through its architecture, places, or its physical setting, but also through the employees with their social interaction who dwell in the environment. An environment without employees is only a blank shell and hence, a dead asset and worthless for knowledge creation and its management. The elimination of interpersonal barriers is necessary for social interaction among employees (Nonaka & Konno, 1998) so that a high frequency of explicit knowledge and information transfer can take place. Explicit knowledge or information is essential for creating new knowledge and its most efficient transfer takes place through communication.

In this regard, it also is important to highlight Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson (1982) (as cited in Birkenbihl, 2004) because they elucidated why the elimination of interpersonal barriers are so important. Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson (1982) explained that a message has a relationship and a content level, where the relationship level dominates the content level. Kruse (2015) corroborated this and highlighted that ‘human action is highly emotional and intuitive’ (Original quote, ‘Menschliches Handeln is hochgradig emotional und intuitive’) (p. 182).

Nonaka and Konno (1998) and Watzlawick et al. (1982) elucidated on what really is needed for a successful explicit knowledge or information transfer that can finally lead to knowledge creation. The link to the founder’s values is found in Nonaka’s and Konno’s (1998) explanation of ‘originating ba’. ‘Originating ba’ is a place where employees share

‘feelings, emotions, experiences and mental models’ (Nonaka & Konno, 1998, p. 46).

The founder’s philosophy and positive values allow for establishing and supporting a setting for positive emotions and positive feelings, which reduces the social interaction barriers to a minimum. This might appear logical and obvious, but, in fact, it is very difficult.

To establish such an environment on a high level requires a lot of time, resources, positive values, and programs to show and share these values as discussed before.

128 8.2.1.9 Like attracts like.

The founders, with their ingredients and possibilities, play a key role because they

‘test’ and employ the staff at the very beginning. Generally, a person (founder) tends to employ someone who shares more or less their philosophy (like attracts like) or thinking so that they can work together well. The applicant selection process is certainly tricky because when new workers start working no one really knows much about them, what they really think, or if they really will fit into the world established by the founder, irrespective of the thoroughness of the job interview. Nevertheless, founders will attempt to employ people who share a similar or the same philosophy with them. If an organisation does this right, it can grow with less ‘human barriers’ and draw on the founder’s philosophy, which will in turn build a very special community.

The findings revealed that the founder’s values really inspired employees, and hence, the inspired employees actively lived and delivered the founder’s philosophy to the other newcomers to the organisation. However, there will still be some who cannot be inspired or do not share the same philosophy of the founder, which would lead to a barrier for

communication and relationships. A discussion with an interviewee showed that for organisations with a special or an extreme marked organisational philosophy, a kind of

‘cleaning process’ exists. In this vein, an organisation can be divided with respect to their employees into three possible areas (see Figure 14). There are organisations where mostly everyone fits in because the organisational philosophy is not ‘lived’ and shown as essential on a very level. If the setting is held ‘neutral’ and the organisation is not built on a high-level philosophy, almost every person can dwell in such an environment. But in such a setting, many interpersonal barriers may emerge leading to a low intensity of knowledge creation. In organisations, extremely shaped by the philosophy of the founder, the employees must share the same or a similar philosophy and values, if not the employees would not be

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able to ‘survive’ within such a setting. Otherwise, it would be too exhausting due to the

‘every day fight’ against the organisational philosophy, which does not conform with one’s own philosophy. An interviewee referred to this cleaning process as ‘spit out’ (Information transcribed/Q42.2). Although the expression ‘spit out’ sounds extreme and rough, it perfectly describes what happens. An organisation that lives the philosophy of the founder on a high level automatically ‘spits out’ those who do not fully fit in. This reduces interpersonal barriers, as it is a kind of a healing process.

Figure 14. Effect of high-intensity philosophy

This phenomenon is vital for knowledge creation because an organisation with a high-intensive environment draws on socialising and communication, and positive values transfer information and explicit knowledge quickly and more efficiently. When the researcher’s practitioner network was asked if such a phenomenon is known to them, some of them just shrugged, while others explained that ‘spit out’ situations are mostly negative ones where the employees finally leave the organisation because of the non-existing relationships, bad attitudes, and non-existing philosophy. For instance, an employee worked in an organisation where the founder treated his workers in a ‘bad’ way, which included shouting around loudly, disrespectful treatment of employees, no values shared, high work load and pressure, and mostly a promise made by the founder was not held. Although the organisation in this instance is successful because of the current demand of the products and the founder’s reach to the customers, the founder and leader of the organisation paid a high loan and the

employee turnover was 75% per year. Additionally, the degree of innovation, improvement, or development was very low. Information was not shared and the employees built no strong

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relationships because of the founder’s philosophy of how to run his world (i.e. organisation) and the ‘negative’ environment so created.