Article Preview
Top2. The Reuse Of The Knowledge “Not Shared” Within The Learning Organizations
Management literature has widely stressed that the performance of an organization depend on the type of knowledge and from the context where knowledge is produced (Hamel & Prahalad, 1991; Carayannis & Wang, 2012). Industrialization, for instance, requires more knowledge codification, which supports the repetitiveness and standardization of production processes as well as more efficient and effective control systems of the production activities, especially in terms of quality and costs. Then organisational learning can be interpreted as a process by which a “learning” organization, in which knowledge is accumulated for the effect of group interactions, creates its own set of new knowledge assets (Nonaka, 1991, 1994; Nicotra et al., 2013).
Organisational learning is mainly considered, in the managerial and psychological literature, as an organisational experimentation process based on the creative use of both direct and indirect experience of individuals (Weick, 1993). Thus organizational learning is strictly related to individual learning, as well (Kim, 1993). Then, when new knowledge is developed by individuals it should be disseminated and shared with the whole working community (Kolb, 1984; Del Giudice & Straub, 2011).
In reality there are many cases in which knowledge, particularly the tacit one, is not shared by the individuals with the rest of the organization. Sometimes it simply happens that people do not want to share it with the others (Garvin, 1993); but, in some other cases, numerous studies have demonstrated the inherent difficulty of transferring that kind of knowledge by separating it from the individuals who hold it (Senge, 1992; Goh, 1998). Moreover, just very few studies have pointed on what happens when this knowledge is retained by the individuals which did not share it with their working environment (Mabey & Salaman, 1995; Dovey, 1997).