Preface for the Third Edition - Read

522 C. State of Practice
place outside traditional work environments’ was not supported. The positive signs
for the correlations between the share of newly recruited and factors 1, 3 and 4
show a tendency that organizations with a higher share of newly recruited in the
sample experienced an increased willingness to share knowledge. According to the
interviews, the level of recruitment in an organization is a crucial factor that
strongly impacts organizational culture. It is often the newly recruited employees
who are most open to knowledge sharing between work groups and also outside the
work environment (also Swan 2001).
Willingness to share knowledge, particularly parts of the inter-group organizational
learning atmosphere, supposedly suffer in those organizations that experience
a high share of employees leaving the organization. The corresponding correlations
all showed the expected negative sign, but no correlation was significant.
Hypothesis 11: ’A high share of employees leaving the organization negatively
affects willingness to share knowledge between groups and teams’ was therefore
not supported.
13.2.3 Résumé
Once again, it must be noted that results concerning organizational culture generally
have to be interpreted carefully. The item measured here, willingness to share
knowledge, not only carries the well-known conceptual problems as reported in the
literature (e.g., Drumm 1991). The measurement of this item also lacks representativeness
as only one member of the organization was asked to judge this organizations’
willingness to share knowledge. However, the construct was included in the
questionnaire for two reasons:
1. The person responsible for KM supposedly had a good overview of that part of
his or her organization for which he or she was responsible. Pretests also
revealed that knowledge managers considered organizational culture as one of
the most important factors in KM and thus watched it carefully. Many had also
initiated representative culture analyses (some had undergone this process several
times) supporting that their judgements might be more adequate than one
might expect at a first glance.
2. Willingness to share knowledge certainly varies between groups and teams and
even within one group from individual to individual. However, the variables of
interest here were aggregate measures of all the estimations of individuals at an
organization-wide level. As the whole questionnaire was directed exclusively at
the knowledge manager, all answers reflect the perspective on the implementation
of the KM initiative he or she takes. Thus, the judgement of the organizational
culture completed the “picture” which knowledge managers paint of their
initiatives and activities.
Four factors were extracted to reduce the sixteen items describing willingness to
share knowledge. Workspace-related organizational learning atmosphere seems to
be easier to achieve than inter-group organizational learning atmosphere. The
other two factors, rewards for knowledge sharing and knowledge sharing outside