Knowledge sharing

Knowledge sharing is an activity through which knowledge (namely, information, skills, or expertise) is exchanged among people, friends, peers, families, communities (for example, Wikipedia), or within or between organizations. It bridges the individual and organizational knowledge, improving the absorptive and innovation capacity and thus leading to sustained competitive advantage of companies as well as individuals. Knowledge sharing is part of the knowledge management process. Apart from traditional face-to-face knowledge sharing, social media is a good tool because it is convenient, efficient, and widely used. Organizations have recognized that knowledge constitutes a valuable intangible asset for creating and sustaining competitive advantages. However, technology constitutes only one of the many factors that affect the sharing of knowledge in organizations, such as organizational culture, trust, and incentives. The sharing of knowledge constitutes a major challenge in the field of knowledge management because some employees tend to resist sharing their knowledge with the rest of the organization. In the digital world, websites and mobile applications enable knowledge or talent sharing between individuals and/or within teams. The individuals can easily reach the people who want to learn and share their talent to get rewarded. Although knowledge is commonly treated as an object, Dave Snowden has argued it is more appropriate to teach it as both a flow and a thing. Knowledge as a flow can be related to the concept of tacit knowledge. While the difficulty of sharing knowledge is in transferring knowledge from one entity to another, it may prove profitable for organizations to acknowledge the difficulties of knowledge transfer and adopt new knowledge management strategies accordingly. Knowledge can be shared in different ways and levels. The following segmentation sheds light on the essence of sharing. Explicit knowledge sharing occurs when explicit knowledge is made available to be shared between entities.