Improving the Effectiveness of Organizational Knowledge Transfer Through Social Media Use

一个组织帮助员工相互分享知识的能力直接关系到它的创新能力、成长能力和留住顶尖人才的能力。然而，对于许多大型组织来说，知识共享仍然是一个问题。有时，知识共享的问题出现是因为知识本身是粘性的；它需要深入的上下文理解才能解码和应用。其他时候，知识很难转移，因为个人没有适当的关系(强或弱)来应对需要转移的知识类型(默契或显性)，以至于个人不愿花时间和努力教同事一些他们不知道的东西。在其他情况下，问题要简单得多：组织内的人不知道组织中的其他人知道什么，因此无法寻求或与他们分享。本研究的目标是了解新的企业社交媒体如何帮助改善知识共享的至少两个重要方面：帮助人们找到他们需要的知识，并帮助他们建立必要的正确关系，以转移某些类型的知识。随着各组织花费资金和时间实施这些新技术，以提高工人的生产率，了解这些工具是否能够克服与有效知识共享有关的长期问题，并阐明这些技术影响知识共享做法的机制，似乎是及时和重要的。简而言之，这项研究将揭示当曾经是私人的组织通信变成公共通信时会发生什么，以及这种通信可见性可能对整个组织产生的后果。这项研究对教育、劳动力和商业政策具有很大的影响潜力，因为它考虑了重新装备和重塑日益分散的组织的通信环境的战略。

An organization's ability to help employees share knowledge with one another is directly related to its innovativeness, its ability to grow, and its ability to retain top talent. However, knowledge sharing remains a problem for many large organizations. Sometimes, problems of knowledge sharing occur because the knowledge itself is sticky; it requires deep contextual understanding to decode and apply. Other times, knowledge is difficult to transfer because individuals do not have the correct intensity of relationships (strong or weak) for the type of knowledge that needs to be transferred (tacit or explicit) such that individuals are unwilling to take the time and make the effort to teach a colleague something they do not know. In other cases, the problem is much simpler: People within the organization don't know what other people in the organization know and are therefore unable to seek or share with them.The goal of this study is to understand how new enterprise social media can help to improve at least two important aspects of knowledge sharing: Helping people find the knowledge they need and helping them to build the correct kinds of relationships necessary to transfer certain kinds of knowledge. As organizations spend money and time on the implementation of these new technologies in an attempt to increase worker productivity, it seems timely and important to understand not only if such tools can overcome perennial problems associated with effective knowledge sharing, but also to elucidate the mechanisms by which such technologies affect knowledge sharing practices. In short, this research stands to unveil what happens when organizational communications that were once private become public and the consequences that this communication visibility can have for the organization as a whole. This research has high-impact potential for education, labor, and business policies as it considers strategies for retooling and reshaping the communication environments of organizations that are becoming increasingly distributed.