Organizational knowledge
| Organizational knowledge |
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| See also |
Organizational knowledge is a semantic construct which presents the capacity of an organization to combine all knowledge of the employees and to generate a collective knowledge[1].
To sum up, organizational knowledge should be understand as a process of amplifying the knowledge of individuals and crystallising it as a knowledge network of whole organization. More specifically, the aim of this strategy is to convert inexpressible knowledge of individuals into much more structured content which can be used as an advantage.
There is a strong possibility that the organizational knowledge will become a strategic resource for any organizations[2]. Despite of, the division of expanding of orrganizational knowledge is made by the management and a lot of different factors have impact on this decision. Those factors are for example size of organization, dynamics of the business market or position on the business life cycle. However, effective way for managing the knowledge may be a key to the success of the nowadays organizations[3].
Definition by Cambridge Business English Dictionary
It is a different knowledge and skills that are held by the employees of a large organization. Those skills and knowledge are used to work in more efficient way.
Weak and strong sense
When considering an organizational knowledge from different perspectives it may have at last two meanings[4][5]:
- by weak sense, organisational knowledge is understood as a result of people's generations in a social context, transferred and used in a way which is needed by an organization;
- by strong sense, is the capacity of organization's members to draw distinction in the process of carrying out their work by enacting sets of generalizations. The use of those generalizations depends on historically set understandings.
Classification of organizational knowledge
There are many types of organizational knowledge described by many authors. However, two of them are the most common[6]:
- explicit knowledge- this kind of knowledge can be presented in numbers and words in different kind of forms of data and specifications. It can be shared in formal and systematical way;
- tacit knowledge- is more difficult to express, formalize and what is more, to share. It includes hunches, insights and intuitions.Tactic knowing means, that acquired experience cannot be expressed into word, by direct way.
By comparison, cons of the explicit knowledge outweighs props of the second option. What is more, in specific situations the tacit knowledge can be converted into the explicit form to be shared through various communication media.
Footnotes
References
- Bolisani, E., Bratianu, C., (2018).,Emergent knowledge strategies, Springer, p.51
- Bratianu, C., (2015).,Organizational Knowledge Dynamics: Managing Knowledge Creation, Acquisition, Sharing and Transformation, IGI Global
- Sabherwal, R., (2001).,Organizational Knowledge Management: A Contingency Perspective, "Journal of Management Information Systems", p.25
- Tsoukas, H., (2001).,What is organisational Knowledge?, "Journal of Management Studies", Vol. 38:7
Author: Rafał Gamrat
