Knowledge Management and Sharing

Knowledge management research investigates how people and organizations create, exchange, and retain what they know, with particular attention to why some communities share expertise freely while others hoard it. A central challenge is tacit knowledge — the skills and intuitions that experts carry but struggle to articulate — which resists the documentation strategies that work for more explicit information, making virtual communities and social media platforms both promising and unpredictable venues for knowledge exchange. Factors like trust, intrinsic motivation, and the broader organizational climate shape whether individuals actually contribute what they know, and social capital theory helps explain how the quality of relationships within a network either lubricates or blocks that flow. Active research questions include how platform design and community norms can be arranged to sustain contribution over time, and whether the conditions that drive knowledge sharing in face-to-face settings translate reliably into online environments.

Works

71,393

Total citations

967,832

Keywords

Knowledge SharingVirtual CommunitiesSocial CapitalOrganizational ClimateMotivationTrust