Strategic, Metacognitive, and Social Aspects in Resource-oriented Knowledge Exchange

The increasing use of internet and intranet fosters the possibilities for resource-oriented knowledge exchange in large groups of people working in parallel. However, the individual decision to contribute information to a shared pool builds up a public-goods dilemma, and people are often discouraged from sharing knowledge because of strategic reasons. Additionally, the highly anonymous situation where resource-oriented knowledge exchange takes place could further amplify the tendency to withhold knowledge: this situation provides almost no metaknowledge about the importance of one’s information for the others and almost no social cues. In two experiments the effects of metaknowledge and social standards are investigated. Results show that the former influences the quality of the exchanged information, whereas the latter influences the quantity. Resource-Oriented Knowledge Exchange One form of collaborative media use which is becoming more and more important in organizations is the use of shared databases as knowledge repositories. They provide an opportunity for sharing distributed knowledge in groups or organizations. Databases collect information which normally is distributed over all members of an organization, save it permanently and thus make it accessible and searchable for all members of a group or organization (Beckmann, 1999; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). Hence, shared databases can be used to establish some kind of organizational memory. Such shared databases are especially useful in big organizations in which partly similar tasks are accomplished by different people or departments and subgroups (Cress, Barquero, Buder & Hesse, i.p.). Here all group members do not really work together, instead they work in parallel: the different persons or subgroups work on different or partly different tasks, and no common goal exists beyond the general goal that each person should perform the task as best s/he can. In those groups knowledge exchange is especially useful if the performances of the persons or subgroups are interdependent, and each person can benefit 1 In this article we do not distinguish between knowledge and information, even we are aware that from a cognitive point of view there are differences. from each other’s work. In such a situation, the knowledge exchange enhances the performance of all. An example for such a parallel work situation is the following: In a consultancy each consultant’s task is to attend to different companies. To decide which the best strategy is for one of his/her companies, a consultant should know about the efficacy of different possible strategies in other companies which are taken care of by one of her colleagues. To do his/her job in the best way s/he should be able to get information from those other projects. Therefore, knowledge exchange could enhance her/his performance. But the question arises how knowledge can be effectively exchanged in such big organizations. Direct and demandoriented knowledge exchange through asking each other isn’t very efficient when group members do not know which persons are working on which tasks and who the experts are in which domain. Additionally, direct knowledge exchange through asking is not very efficient when similar questions arise for different people. In this case, answering each question separately is an ineffective method of knowledge exchange. Thus, in bigger groups, an effective kind of knowledge exchange seems to be one that is resource oriented instead of demand oriented. This kind of knowledge exchange is based on the idea that each member contributes that part of his/her knowledge which is possibly useful for other members of the organization. But even if the resource-oriented knowledge exchange seems to an effective method for knowledge exchange in parallel working groups, it is reported in many knowledge management projects that implemented databases in organizations that people were reluctant from entering their knowledge into such a shared pool. From a psychological point of view this behavior can be described as a strategic one, resulting from the fact that the situation can be described as a social dilemma. Strategic Aspect: Knowledge Exchange as Social Dilemma From a psychological point of view the resource-oriented knowledge exchange has the formal structure of a social dilemma (Fulk, Flanagin, Kalman, Monge & Ryan, 1996; Hollingshead, Fulk & Monge, 2002; Thorn & Connolly, 1987): People are reluctant to enter their knowledge into a shared database because contributing is associated with individual costs. As knowledge in organizations is quite often seen as a kind of power, the contribution of knowledge to a shared pool is perceived as a loss of individual power