Unmasking barriers to knowledge sharing using a communication framework

Knowledge Management is an area where many different research disciplines have yielded a wide variety of results that are often confusing and, occasionally, conflicting. In particular, more than one hundred barriers to knowledge sharing have been identified in the literature, but the field of knowledge management has advanced little because managers are largely unable to take action based on these discoveries.; This study focuses on knowledge sharing within an organizational environment. The knowledge-sharing transaction is a fundamental process in knowledge management, since knowledge that is not shared is of little practical value. In particular, this study investigates knowledge workers' perceptions regarding the relative importance of different types of barriers to knowledge sharing and investigates a possible relationship between the perceived relative importance of the barriers and the knowledge-sharing context. The purpose of this study is to inform researchers and practitioners so that future research and management efforts can be focused on reducing or eliminating barriers that have the most prohibitive effects on intraorganizational knowledge sharing. This study developed a methodology to employ multiple methods to investigate perceived barriers to knowledge sharing and the relationship between these barriers and the knowledge sharing context. A sample of 66 knowledge workers in a large service organization participated in a field experiment by performing a Q-sort task where they were presented with four hypothetical situations that represented four different knowledge sharing contexts and asked to evaluate the relative impediment that each of the barriers present in that context. A sample of 153 knowledge workers in the same organization participated in a survey of a similar nature. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) performed on both data sets support the finding that some barriers to knowledge sharing are perceived by knowledge workers to be significantly more important than others and also that the perceived importance of barriers to knowledge sharing is dependent upon the context of the knowledge sharing task. The findings show that a communications model developed for this research provides a valid, objective framework from which to study knowledge sharing. Further implications that these findings hold for business and for future research are discussed.