3.1.2. Use of Web 2.0 for KM, Tacit Knowledge Sharing and Context Variables

We found moderate support for the proposition that Incentive for participating in KM activities positively affects the relationship between the use of web 2.0 technology for KM at the inpidual level and tacit knowledge sharing between inpiduals working in that organization. Interviewees thought that incentive plays a positive role in tacit knowledge sharing between inpiduals in the web 2.0-based KM environment. However, interviewees also mentioned that the role of the incentive might not be noteworthy for all the inpiduals, as many inpiduals share tacit knowledge because they are excited about the subject matter.

In our study some interviewees thought that incentives, especially informal incentives such as recognition of contribution leading to better performance review, play a positive role in facilitating tacit as well explicit knowledge sharing between inpiduals in web 2.0-based KM. Incentives could be via very formal routes such as monetary, or via rather informal routes such as recognition, which can lead to better performance review. Incentives encourage inpiduals to share their earned knowledge. For example, an interviewee from organization B stated regarding his feeling towards incentive for sharing knowledge,

Whenever your supervisor is doing performance reviews, one part is how much you have contributed to the wikiB. In there you can mention that you have started a wiki/blog and showed how to do some neat stuff with Java to make other people’s life easier. Let me give you another example. We used to use Lotus note for email. One of the problems with Lotus note was that it used to crash sometimes and in order to make it work again we had to restart the system. It was kind of time consuming to restart the machine, load all the programs, and losing data. But, now one person came out with a solution, posted it on the wiki, that if you download this small program then Lotus note will not crash. Now this person will mention that this was his contribution to the wikiB which can help him to earn better review (i.e. annual performance review).

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In addition, we found that while incentives have a positive effect for some people, there are inpiduals who share their earned knowledge just because they are passionate about the subject matter. For those people incentive isn’t a significant motivating factor for sharing knowledge. As stated by an interviewee from top management in organization B,

At one time we tried giving some cash amount for their contribution. But we found that to be expensive. But even without the cash we found that some people are very passionate about their work and they provide their experience of working in projects just because they are passionate about your work.

Our results show that incentives do not always significantly affect tacit knowledge sharing of inpiduals. However, incentives, especially informal incentive such as recognition for contribution, can motivate some inpiduals to share tacit knowledge. This finding essentially informs the management that they should not rely solely on incentive mechanism to increase tacit knowledge sharing among inpiduals. Nevertheless, it is important that the management creates a culture of recognizing employees’ knowledge sharing as an informal incentive mechanism.

Another context variable we st udied is supervisor’s and co-workers’ support. We found support for the proposition that supervisor’s and co-workers’ support for participating in KM activities positively affects the relationship between use of web 2.0 technology for KM in an organization and inpiduals’ tacit knowledge sharing. The interviewees thought that encouragement and recognition by supervisor motivates employees to share tacit knowledge.