Purpose: The significance of managing and sharing employee knowledge for successful organizational change, innovation, and for sustainable advantage has indeed been suggested by research since the last few decades. Despite numerous attempts to foster the sharing of knowledge in organizations, employees may not always be willing to share knowledge attributed due to personal beliefs or situational constraints leading to hiding of knowledge. This article provides a theoretical basis by identifying and illustrating the present and the possible myriad of knowledge hiding (KH) events by employees within organizations.Design/methodology/approach: Drawing literature from numerous sources, this paper adopts synthesis and provides a review of the literature and proposes framework.Findings: This paper identifies six broad drivers which may lead to KH, including: driven by situation explain the reason for unintentional hiding as a result of performance and competition leads to individual to have a motive to hide knowledge, driven by psychological ownership leads to controlled hiding, driven by hostility and abuse by employees or managers leads to victimized hiding and lastly driven by identity and norms leads to favoured hiding. Furthermore, this study uncovers three potential future events, which need managerial attention: negative reciprocity, influenced disengagement and perceived disengagement.Originality/value: This paper also offers new insights to managers to understand the present events and foresee the possible reasons about the KH behaviour and how they can strategize to reduce these events and undergo organizational change.
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to systematically synthesize the extant literature of knowledge sharing (KS) and knowledge transfer (KT) in the small and medium enterprise (SME) context and to contribute with predictions of emerging themes.Design/methodology/approach: Applied is a systematic literature review using three bibliometric techniques: (1) textual analysis for keywords and abstracts to identify the research hotspots, (2) co-citation analysis of references to identify the evolution of KS and KT in SME and (3) bibliographic coupling analysis of documents to synthesize antecedents and outcomes.Findings: A conceptual map emerges from the review to reveal the antecedents of KS and KT at the individual, group and organizational levels. The analysis shows the strategic importance of KS and KT for the SME context. Specific findings include: (1) KS and KT are involved in enhancing SMEs strategic focus for human resources, including organizational learning, customer relations, creativity, higher profit and positive effects on operational processes and decision-making. (2) Innovation, trust and performance are identified as central human factors linked to KS and KT in SMEs. (3) Human resource (HR) management research could contribute to KS and KT in the SME domain by exploring KS- and KT-based practices, linking the emergence of innovation and innovative behaviors to these practices, leading to a better understanding of strategies that enable the long-term storage and retrieval of tacit and explicit knowledge as organizational memory in the SME context.Originality/value: This paper is one of the first to systematically review KS and KT in SMEs and propose a concept map. The research adds value to the growing literature of KS and KT and exposes the need for more specific activities to support SME managers, as well as HR managers, who need to facilitate KS and KT in SMEs.
Purpose: Scholarly interest in interorganizational learning (IOL) has spiked in the past decade because of its potential to absorb, transfer and create valuable knowledge for enhanced innovative performance and sustained competitive advantage. However, only a handful of review studies exists on the topic. The evolution of IOL has not been studied explicitly and there is a lack of understanding of the field trends. To fill this gap, this paper aims to comprehensively review the literature on IOL and map its evolution and trends using bibliometric techniques. In particular, the authors use visualization of science mapping freeware to systematize the findings and interpret the results.Design/methodology/approach: The authors synthesize the findings using “evaluative bibliometric techniques” to identify the quality and quantity indicators of the IOL research and use “relational bibliometric techniques” to determine the structural indicators of the IOL field such as the intellectual foundations and emerging research themes of IOL research.Findings: Through an analysis of 208 journal publications obtained from the Scopus database, the authors determine the leading authors, countries, highly cited papers and their contributions to the IOL literature. By identifying the key hotspots, intellectual foundations and emerging trends of IOL, the authors provide promising avenues in IOL research.Originality/value: To the best of the knowledge, this study is the first to systematically review the IOL literature and provide future research directions.
Purpose: Despite the strong focus on virtues in firms, humility is little recognized in the management literature and, more particularly in the literature about knowledge sharing (KS). Despite efforts to foster KS among employees in firms, the effectiveness of this process narrows down to the dyadic relationship between the knowledge seeker and provider within firm. This paper aims to investigate the role of humility in the KS process in dyadic activity. Design/methodology/approach: The authors undertake an exploratory investigation to fill some of the gaps found in the literature. The paper draws insights from psychology, history, religion, current events and management literature. Findings: The authors identify several individual propensities that help predict humility towards sharing knowledge from seeker (humble knowledge-inquiry) and provider perspectives (humble response). They propose a new conceptual process model of KS with humility as an important variable to consider. This work highlights several promising directions for future research. Originality/value: As per the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that investigates the role of humility in knowledge sharing from dyadic perspective. The authors also introduce concepts of humble knowledge inquiry and humble response in a dyadic context for effective knowledge sharing process.