Preface for the Third Edition - Read

226 B. Concepts and Theories
not apply (e.g., the tracking of the headers of emails contributed to newsgroups)
employees might be sensitive to the organizations’ activities 380 .
All of these concepts describe cultural phenomena and their effects on KM.
Clearly, in order to improve an organization’s level of willingness to share knowledge,
a high level of care is desirable. It is not as easy to decide upon the effectiveness
of the four types of KM environments. The degree of sensitivity of interest
finally shows that KM initiatives have to be careful about the instruments they
apply. Employees or representatives of employees should be contacted early on in
order to avoid organized resistance to the initiative. Several instruments were suggested
to make care widespread and sustainable in organizational relationships
(von Krogh 1998, 143) or, in more general terms, to instill an open culture:
incentive system rewarding cooperation or behavior that shows care;
mentoring programs;
knowledge sharing and caring behavior as part of employee assessments and
career management;
trust, openness and courage as explicitly stated values;
training programs in care-based behavior;
project debriefings and other forms of learning-oriented conversations;
social events and meetings;
private contents in KMS that provide context for trusted relationships.
Apart from these rather general statements and hypotheses about a positive
influence of incentives and motivational aids on an organizational culture more
supportive of KM, systematic studies about the effects of such systems are rare up
to now 381 .
Measuring organizational culture is a serious problem and has to be assessed
indirectly 382 . In the empirical study, the single dimension measured reflecting
organizational culture is willingness to share knowledge. However, even this portion
of organizational culture remains vaguely defined and empirical assessments
are rare so far. The approach taken here consequently shows a trade-off between
the requirements of cultural investigations on the one hand and the limited amount
of effort that organizations are willing to spend on empirical studies on the other
hand. The problem is either (1) to perform a rigorous cultural analysis which
would have required to question or interview a representative sample of employees
per organization participating in the empirical study and thus would have limited
the sample to a handful of organizations at best or (2) to completely leave the organizational
culture out of consideration.
380. See the abundant literature, e.g., published in the German journal “Datenschutz und
Datensicherheit, see also the journal’s comprehensive Web site on the topic: URL:
http://www.dud.de/.
381. See also Döring-Katerkamp 2002 who performed an empirical study on the use of
incentives to improve motivation to participate in KM.
382. See section 6.4.1 - “Definition” on page 221.