The Knowledge Fluctuation in an Organization
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The knowledge fluctuation in an organization depends on factors such as the death, transfers, retirement and retrenchment of staff, factors resulting from natural and artificial effects. The physical factors include diseases and accidents while the artificial factors are those the come from the persons themselves or the affiliate organization.
Demographic shifts prevent organizations from maintaining explicit knowledge in their knowledge banks while the persons who relevant knowledge are attached to moves out without their knowledge sharing. According to the journal of forensic and accounting, "There are certain organizational factors that limit employee knowledge sharing". Companies with high technology environment may discourage employees from knowledge sharing as they try to as they keep on trying to cope with advanced levels of volatility and frequent changes. This widens the gap of the knowledge required by the organization for innovation and sustainability. Thus, the group dynamics and environment are very critical in knowledge acquisition and management to maintain corporate competitiveness.
The organization needs to understand the external factors as much as the internal factors as they both dictate the organizational decisions and affects the day to day operations. Organizations must have mechanisms of transforming tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge in order to encourage knowledge sharing, according to Ron G. et al. (2013). For this reason, therefore, an organization requires "encouraging functions of research and development in order to grow", according to Aerohive Networks, its knowledge custody and avail relevant knowledge to its employees through set and accessible means. Ron G. et al. note “tacit knowledge can be transformed into explicit knowledge that can then be processed and availed for users” (2013) through developed systems.
There may be a perception that employees hold on to their knowledge and later on exit the company without the knowledge being shared, even as much as the group has not developed measures to encourage knowledge sharing. Information sharing is an important path in realizing the knowledge value in an organization, according to Zeng and Tang (2014) who further notes that “dominance of tacit knowledge get to facilitate the knowledge sharing and innovation, improve organizational competitiveness and explore the creative potential of individuals.” These authors further say that often “the role of thinking formed along with a long time experience” is commonly ignored, and that everybody has a kind of judgment as the communication between them and others take place. This situation can influence one another and develop to a certain kind of knowledge.
Knowledge sharing improves personal wisdom and provides strength in performing duties assigned efficiently, thus the exchange of knowledge the driving force for organizational efficiency and development. There must be strategies developed within organizations that can transform tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge as tacit knowledge belongs to the individual and is difficult to describe and communicate. Zeng and Tang quotes Yang (2004) in their work that “tacit knowledge can be expressed through the process of individual tacit knowledge being communicated and shared to convert people’s experience, improve their psychological activity and judgment into transparent organizing mode that can be expressed by languages and in turn promote innovativeness.”
Knowledge management perspective can be used to analyze the process of turning tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge and share the knowledge to obtain its innovation value for the competitiveness of the organization. This transformation should be conducted reasonably as per its specialty for easier understanding by those accessed to it and to enable capacity also to learn explicit knowledge in a better way. The organizations can consider one of the models such as the SECI model as described by Wu (2010) and in SIIM(2011) to diagnose organizational knowledge creation processes in both internal and external environments. Other models that can be used are 3M model and OS models. The challenges raised by the models then should be identified and adjustments to suit the organization made.
A company or an organization may decide to apply knowledge management techniques in maintaining their customers and improving their products or services. In the process, capacity can be created in order for an organization to identify the efficient modes of operations from their staff and acquire that knowledge for future reference and use. It may also intend to evaluate their product and service attributes that impact the markets. Such knowledge is important in informing product and services adjustments, satisfy the consumer and expand the market.
Different products and services offered by a firm typically do not receive equal preferences by consumers. The attributes of these products should be explored in different markets and correlated to come up with knowledge that will inform the company in “developing its market strategies”, according to Jackson and Verna. There are several factors that inform consumer choice of products. Such factors include but are not limited to brand loyalty, the consumer gender, consumer knowledge of the product, economic status, among others. The company can take such statistics from users and customers from direct interaction or indirectly through the study of the market so as to understand the behavior of the consumers and their products in the market.
For instance, we can try to determine reasons as to why a company can lose tacit and explicit knowledge embedded on their employees. A small research can be done in Human Resource departments to establish reasons why employees leave their jobs from that firm over a period of one year. Let it be taken that at a particular branch, the company have 100 employees. Over the period of a year, a number of them leave their jobs for different reasons that could be established from their records. Through this, the company lost tacit and explicit knowledge due to the movement of staff out of the company. New employees however may replace the others who quit the job, but not equate the extent of knowledge expressed by the initial employees. The research was conducted in three branches as below;