Knowledge sharing: moving away from the obsession with best practices

Purpose – How companies can become better at knowing what they know, and share what they know have in recent years become dominant fields of research within knowledge management. The literature focuses on why people share knowledge, or why they fail to share knowledge, whilst the discussion of what they actually share has been pinned down to the concept of best practices. In this paper it is argued that there is more to knowledge sharing than the sharing of best practices. Knowledge sharing is more than the closing of performance gaps and the sharing of stocks of knowledge – knowledge sharing is also about bridging situations of organizational interdependencies and thereby supporting ongoing organizational activities. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is both theoretical and empirical. Theoretically, the concept of organizational interdependence is applied to create a conceptual framework encompassing four types of knowledge to be shared. The theoretical framework is appl...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: JKM
• Authors: Peter Holdt Christensen
• Keywords: JKM 2007, Knowledge Sharing, Paper, Sharing