The Dimensions of Knowledge Sharing

Many authors have come to realize that knowledge management is the key to organizational performance and survival in continuously changing economic, technological, political, and social environment. Knowledge sharing is among the main activities of the knowledge management process. Indeed, due to the division of labor and accompanying fragmentation, specialization, and distribution of knowledge, organizations create permanent or temporary units – called organizational settings – in order to achieve collective goals such as products and services development and delivery. Organizational settings are composed of organizational actors with complementary knowledge, who need to share knowledge since they can’t achieve a collective outcome individually. Therefore knowledge sharing is required either within or between organizational settings so that organizations remain productive and competitive and reach their objectives Nevertheless, as experienced by many organizations, knowledge sharing is difficult to take place in practice, whatever the strategy followed. We think that there is no silver bullet to solve the knowledge sharing problem within modern organizations. Knowledge sharing is a situated process whose improvement depends on the characteristics of organizations. In this paper, we propose a framework which identifies the main aspects of knowledge sharing – called knowledge sharing dimensions – on which it is possible to act in order to improve the knowledge sharing process