Organizational Knowledge: Ethics and the Importance of Trust

The aim of this paper is to grasp the ethical dilemmas that arise into organizational knowledge and the importance of trust for diminishing these dilemmas. Therefore, it focuses three key issues: knowledge management (concept; and, schools of thought); knowledge flowing models versus ethics (mental models; the Socialization, Externalization, Combination, Internalization (SECI) model; and, Fiske’s relational model); and finally, the importance of trust as a possible answer. Plus, this paper suggests that the previous models only focus knowledge as continuum process and the result of this process omits ethical and moral dilemmas (obligation to share, personal property, personal worth, autonomy, dignity, privacy, etc.). These ethical dilemmas clearly weaken a knowledge management project, and how trust is a reliable answer. The absence of empirical work should be considered a limitation of this paper; however, does not diminish the importance for this debate.

[1]  S. Fiske,et al.  Confusing one person with another: what errors reveal about the elementary forms of social relations. , 1991, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[2]  Richard Baskerville,et al.  Conflicts between privacy and property: The discourse in personal and organizational knowledge , 2007, J. Strateg. Inf. Syst..

[3]  Chih-Chien Wang,et al.  The Influence of Ethical and Self-Interest Concerns on Knowledge Sharing Intentions among Managers: An Empirical Study , 2004 .

[4]  Johannes Britz,et al.  Slave or sibling: a moral reframing the corporate knowledge sharing community , 2006 .

[5]  Ikujiro Nonaka,et al.  Managing Industrial Knowledge: Creation, Transfer and Utilization , 2001 .

[6]  R. Taormina,et al.  Interrelating leadership behaviors, organizational socialization, and organizational culture , 2008 .

[7]  B. Misztal.  Trust in Modern Societies: The Search for the Bases of Social Order , 1996 .

[8]  F. Fukuyama.  Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity Penguin London , 1995 .

[9]  Gad Yair.  Insecurity, Conformity and Community , 2008 .

[10]  A. Furnham,et al.  Counterproductive Behaviours at Work , 2004 .

[11]  J. H. Davis,et al.  An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust: Past, Present, and Future , 2007 .

[12]  R. Nesse,et al.  The evolution of psychodynamic mechanisms , 1992 .

[13]  John Bolender,et al.  The Genealogy of the Moral Modules , 2003, Minds and Machines.

[14]  Grant Michelson,et al.  ‘You Didn't Hear it From Us But…’: Towards an Understanding of Rumour and Gossip in Organisations , 2002 .

[15]  G. Costa,et al.  Individual ethics and knowledge management: Arising conflicts , 2008 .

[16]  Cultural Metaphors: Their Use in Management Practice as a Method for Understanding Cultures , 2011 .

[17]  Cognition and intelligence: identifying mechanisms of the mind , 2006 .

[18]  E. Uslaner.  The Foundations of Trust: Macro and Micro , 2007 .

[19]  Y. Malhotra.  Why Knowledge Management Systems Fail: Enablers and Constraints of Knowledge Management in Human Enterprises , 2004 .

[20]  Nancy M. Carlson,et al.  Common Knowledge: How Companies Thrive by Sharing What They Know , 2001 .

[21]  A. Bennet,et al.  The Rise of the Knowledge Organization , 2004 .

[22]  L. Cosmides,et al.  The Adapted mind : evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture , 1992 .

[23]  C. Holsapple.  Handbook on Knowledge Management 1 , 2004, International Handbooks on Information Systems.

[24]  N. Anderson,et al.  Handbook of Industrial, Work & Organizational Psychology , 2001 .

[25]  Robert W. Zmud,et al.  Behavioral Intention Formation in Knowledge Sharing: Examining the Roles of Extrinsic Motivators, Social-Psychological Factors, and Organizational Climate , 2005, MIS Q..

[26]  T. D. Wilson,et al.  The nonsense of knowledge management , 2002, Inf. Res..

[27]  M. Verweij.  Towards a Theory of Constrained Relativism: Comparing and Combining the Work of Pierre Bourdieu, Mary Douglas and Michael Thompson, and Alan Fiske , 2008 .

[28]  M. Lynne Markus,et al.  Toward A Theory of Knowledge Reuse : Types of Knowledge Reuse Situations and Factors in Reuse Success , 2022 .

[29]  A. Tudor,et al.  Impact Of International Financial Reporting Standards On Accounting Practices Harmonization Within European Union -Particular Case Of Intangible Assets- , 2010 .

[30]  Asst. Prof. John Bolender.  Two Accounts of Moral Diversity: The Cognitive Science of Pluralism and Absolutism , 2004 .

[31]  A. Goldman.  Ethics and Cognitive Science , 1993, Ethics.

[32]  J. Coleman.  Foundations of Social Theory , 1990 .