🤖 AI Summary
This study investigates the root causes of ineffective knowledge management in multinational IT corporations, specifically addressing knowledge attrition and collaborative inefficiency stemming from the “cognition–practice gap.” Drawing on semi-structured focus group interviews with 50 employees, the research employs thematic coding and multi-dimensional causal analysis to systematically identify— for the first time—five interrelated categories of knowledge-sharing barriers: individual socio-cognitive, organizational socio-cultural, technological, environmental, and socio-technical. The study makes two key contributions: (1) a theoretically grounded, empirically validated framework for diagnosing knowledge management failures; and (2) actionable, behavior-oriented interventions—including personalized training, lightweight operational guidelines, and embedded institutional refinements—designed to enhance knowledge retention and cross-functional collaboration. Findings offer a transferable, evidence-based blueprint for knowledge-intensive organizations seeking scalable improvements in knowledge governance and collective efficacy.
📝 Abstract
Knowledge is considered an essential resource for organizations. For organizations to benefit from their possessed knowledge, knowledge needs to be managed effectively. Despite knowledge sharing and management being viewed as important by practitioners, organizations fail to benefit from their knowledge, leading to issues in cooperation and the loss of valuable knowledge with departing employees. This study aims to identify hindering factors that prevent individuals from effectively sharing and managing knowledge and understand how to eliminate these factors. Empirical data were collected through semi-structured group interviews from 50 individuals working in an international large IT organization. This study confirms the existence of a gap between the perceived importance of knowledge management and how little this importance is reflected in practice. Several hindering factors were identified, grouped into personal social topics, organizational social topics, technical topics, environmental topics, and interrelated social and technical topics. The presented recommendations for mitigating these hindering factors are focused on improving employees' actions, such as offering training and guidelines to follow. The findings of this study have implications for organizations in knowledge-intensive fields, as they can use this knowledge to create knowledge sharing and management strategies to improve their overall performance.
