Knowledge sharingis the process through which explicit or tacit knowledge is
communicated to other individuals. Three important clarifications are in order. First,
knowledge sharing means effective transfer, so that the recipient of knowledge can
understand it well enough to act on it (Jensen and Meckling 1996). Second, what
is shared is knowledge rather than recommendations based on the knowledge; the
former involves the recipient acquiring the shared knowledge as well as being able
to take action based on it, whereas the latter (which is direction, discussed in the next
section) simply involves utilization of knowledge without the recipient internalizing
the shared knowledge. Third, knowledge sharing may take place across individuals
as well as across groups, departments, or organizations (Alavi and Leidner 2001).
If knowledge exists at a location that is different from where it is needed, either
knowledge sharing or knowledge utilization without sharing (discussed in the next
section) is necessary. Sharing knowledge is clearly an important process in enhanc-ing organizational innovativeness and performance. This is reflected in the fact it
was one of the three business processes for which General Electric Company CEO
Jack Welch took personal responsibility (the others were allocation of resources and
development of people) (Stewart 2000).
Depending on whether explicit or tacit knowledge is being shared, exchange or
socialization processes are used. Socialization, which we have discussed above,
facilitates the sharing of tacit knowledge in cases in which new tacit knowledge is
being created as well as when new tacit knowledge is not being created. There is
no intrinsic difference between the socialization process when used for knowledge
discovery or knowledge sharing, although the way in which the process may be used
could be different. For example, when used to share knowledge, a face-to-face meet-ing (a mechanism that facilitates socialization) could involve a question-and-answer
session between the sender and recipient of knowledge, whereas when used to cre-ate knowledge a face-to-face meeting could take more the form of a debate or joint
problem-solving, as seen in Box 4.1.
Exchange,in contrast to socializati