Research On The Effects Of Online Social Networks And Employee Mobility On Organization Tacit Knowledge Sharing

Knowledge resources have replaced natural resources, labor and capital resources etc. and become the basis for enterprises to create and maintain sustainable competitive advantage with the advent of knowledge economy era. Knowledge resources in an organization can be understood from two dimensions. They are explicit and tacit knowledge. Human knowledge exists more in the form of tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is the basis of explicit knowledge and it is the core resource in human brain which governs human behavior. Tacit knowledge sharing can make tacit knowledge propagate and use in definite range and save the cost of tacit knowledge acquisition to enhance tacit knowledge productivity and promote knowledge innovation. Tacit knowledge sharing becomes the core elements that drive enterprise continuable development. The real power of enterprise is not derived from tacit knowledge, but from tacit knowledge sharing. However, tacit knowledge sharing will not automatically come true. Therefore, it has become a hot topic to be solved urgently in modern enterprise management theory and practice that how to promote tacit knowledge sharing effectively in an organization.Traditional research on tacit knowledge sharing mainly focuses on descriptive and empirical researches. They summarized the existing phenomena and then predicted the future behavior. Although they are successful in revealing certain phenomena of tacit knowledge sharing,they are not systematic and rarely form a complete theoretical system.There are also scholars who use rate-based differential-equations to establish the dynamic models of the spread of tacit knowledge in order to study this topic. The traditional approach is unable to deal with tacit knowledge spreading in realistic contact process among the individual members of the organization with significant heterogeneity due to its assumption of uniformly mixing populations. Accordingly, the approach based on the method of transmission dynamics on complex network and computer simulation has become an important trend in this research area of knowledge sharing. Nowadays, multinational companies have numerous and many companies have established branches in different areas. It will produce both the numbers who have a tacit knowledge and needs of it. At this time, if knowledge can not timely be shared, it will cause the waste of repeated development and repeated cost of loss.Achieving tacit knowledge sharing between the sub organizations in an enterprise mainly adopt the approach of the mobility of employees who have tacit knowledge between the sub organizations. Therefore, it has been widespread concern of management science and engineering that how to control the movement of persons. Online social networks (OSNs)have rapidly developed into a class of highly effective tool for knowledge dissemination in recent decades. OSNs are playing more important role than the foregone tools in knowledge sharing activities. With these facts,a series of related theoretical quantitative studies that focused on the effects of employee mobility and online social networks on tacit knowledge sharing in organizaitons have been carried out from both theoretical and applied levels in this paper.We construct the model of tacit knowledge transmission for describing a tacit knowledge spreading in the two organizations with employee mobility and we consider the introduction and resignation of employees.We calculate the threshold of distinguishing whether to realize tacit knowledge sharing between organizations. The research shows that it can effectively promote tacit knowledge sharing between organizations that mobilizing individuals with tacit knowledge by a certain propotion between the two sub-organizations according to the threshold obtained by this study and since the contrary.For an organization, it can actually be regarded as knowledge dissemination and evolution in the specific social network structure that knowledge sharing among individual numbers in the organization.Achieving tacit knowledge sharing in an organization depends on topology of social network composed of organization members, but also on the nature property and propagation characteristics of tacit knowledge.Accordingly, this study viewed the employees of an organization using online social networks to communicate with one another and their contacts as an undirected network. We consider two routes of tacit knowledge transmission which are contact through online social networks for users and face-to-face physical contact for employees. We propose a tacit knowledge transmission model on networks with even mixing and derive the threshold that governs whether or not a kind of tacit knowledge can be shared in an organization with few initial employees who have acquired it. This paper systematically analyzes the important influence of the degree distribution of the users' contact network on tacit knowledge sharing among members in the organization. A conclusion we have drawn is essentially different from the conclusions that researching tacit knowledge sharing in an organization established on homogeneous mixed network in the past. That is if the users' contact network have sufficiently high heterogeneity, even infinitesimally small transmission rates can make a kind of tacit knowledge exist and spread among employees in an organization. Thereby, this conclusion subverts the traditional and limited transmission threshold.In addition to the above main work, this paper constructs a tacit knowledge spreading model on networks with consideration of intention mechanism. This study performs some analysis systematically the effect of tacit knowledge sharing intention of members in an organization on tacit knowledge sharing in the organization from the perspective of theoretical and quantitative research and derives the threshold that governs whether a tacit knowledge can be shared among individuals in the organization. We draw two kinds of methods which can promote tacit knowledge sharing in the organization. This study compares the validity of the two methods through presenting the sensitivity analysis of parameters. During the research of this paper, we try to take advantage of the existed outcomes and carry out the numerical simulation to the models established by this paper in order to verify the feasibility of the models and the correctness of the theoretical results. The threshold theory can explain that tacit knowledge sharing among members in an organization or between organizaitons is not a gradual process. It cannot make a tacit knowledge shared by all of members in the organization that a few members gained this tacit knowledge, but this knowledge will be spread in the tissue when the number of individuals is reached the threshold condition, thus tacit knowledge sharing in the organization will be achieved. The threshold obtained provides an essential theoretical basis to carry out quantitative, intensive and systematic knowledge management (KM) for organizations.These conclusions make the paper innovative and instructive both in theory and in practice.