An Empirical and Modeling Approach to Knowledge Management Practices in South American Organizations

Learned 86 knowledge isn't a bad thing though it can easily bring up misunderstandings and lack of conceptual consistency.Our view is that this "KM black box" shouldn't be considered as a limitation but rather as a stimulating opportunity to enlarge a multidisciplinary fieldencompassing computer science, to human, social, and administration sciences, as reflected in the variety of topics covered by this book.The work presented hereafter is less focused on theoretical implications regarding KM but is more oriented to day to day KM practices inside South American organizations.Specifically, the following section explores the structural and management factors that constrain -or favor, KM practices. Structural and management requirements for KM deploymentLess widespread is the study and understanding of the constraints underlying knowledge creation and sharing inside organizations.This is particularly true in South American organizations.These organizational requirements are among others based on organizational values and culture, management and leadership practices, motivational incentives, size, and technology availability (Ko et al, 2005).It seems important to emphasize that most research in KM consider these requirements as granted or given a priori.Therefore one of the direct questions addressed in this chapter is: how do these organizational constraints affect KM practices and deployment inside South American organizations?Firstly, regarding the organizational values only an effective organizational culture can promote the deployment of systematic KM practices as employees' skills and only motivation isn't self sufficient.For that reason explicit efforts to cultivate a knowledge sharing culture are essential (De Long and Fahey, 2000).Past research has focused on organizational, social, motivational, and technical factors that favor or inhibit knowledge sharing.The complexity to act over these factors explain some of the difficulties encountered by managers in creating knowledge mindsets and effective and sustainable KM programs in their organizations (see Smith et al., 2010, De Long andFahey, 2000).Mindsets can be associated to mental models acting as cognitive filters that influence decision making processes (Smith et al., 2010).Secondly, promoting knowledge mindsets, cultures and knowledge sharing values isn't sufficient if other important organizations structural factors are ignored.One of them that to our knowledge hasn't yet been considered in the KM literature is organizational justice.The organizational justice concept refers to the personnel's fairness perception regarding the equity in distributions (e.g., rewards allocation), the fairness of organizational procedures (e.g., assessment evaluation, types of labor contracts that are offered) and the fairness in interactions (e.g.treatment made by a manager or the shared information; Adams, 1963;Leventhal, 1976;Bies and Moag, 1986) If one of these three dimensions is perceived as unfair it will act on employee's motivation and loyalty and thus affect the knowledge sharing and transfer process independently of the existence of explicit KM values in the organization.A secondary variable to consider is the size of the organization that has an effect in the existence of KM practices: the bigger the organization, more likely it is to exhibit KM practices whether these are implicit or explicit (Matzkin, 2008).Hence, the above dynamics (i.e.: bottom-up and top-down information and knowledge flows, knowledge sharing mindsets, values, and a number of structural variables) are essential to generate the necessary capacity for openness in order to transform tacit into actionable explicit knowledge.It must be added that though the role of culture and values is www.intechopen.com