Communities of Practice Purposefully Designed for Improving Business Performance

The recent economic crisis, budget cutbacks, and lack of measurable benefits have resulted in many organizations reducing their budgets for knowledge management (KM) and discontinuing related communities of practice (CoPs). This paper aims to explore management approaches to purposefully creating and sustaining strategically designed CoPs as a tool to deliver tangible organizational performance improvements. This research identifies management approaches to intentionally creating CoPs by conducting a comprehensive exploratory case study research based on in-depth interviews with executives, middle managers, and employees in three field sites located in Thailand's manufacturing sector. One of the cases included in this study discontinued its corporate KM efforts during the last economic crisis, in 2009, and such efforts have yet to be reinstated. The three case studies demonstrate how these companies purposefully designed and established CoPs to target tangible organizational objectives and how they refocused the agenda of their CoPs in order to support productivity improvements in addition to other more traditional KM goals. This study also identifies the structures of a CoP created with the intention of achieving tangible organizational performance goals. Organizations that create CoPs with the purpose of improving tangible organizational performance dimensions can gain insights from our findings with respect to designing and managing such CoPs. This paper is one of the first to empirically explore and describe approaches to creating and managing CoPs in order to improve explicit business performance goals. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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