An organization's ability to help employees share knowledge with one another is directly related to its innovativeness, its ability to grow, and its ability to retain top talent. However, knowledge sharing remains a problem for many large organizations. Sometimes, problems of knowledge sharing occur because the knowledge itself is sticky; it requires deep contextual understanding to decode and apply. Other times, knowledge is difficult to transfer because individuals do not have the correct intensity of relationships (strong or weak) for the type of knowledge that needs to be transferred (tacit or explicit) such that individuals are unwilling to take the time and make the effort to teach a colleague something they do not know. In other cases, the problem is much simpler: People within the organization don't know what other people in the organization know and are therefore unable to seek or share with them.
The goal of this study is to understand how new enterprise social media can help to improve at least two important aspects of knowledge sharing: Helping people find the knowledge they need and helping them to build the correct kinds of relationships necessary to transfer certain kinds of knowledge. As organizations spend money and time on the implementation of these new technologies in an attempt to increase worker productivity, it seems timely and important to understand not only if such tools can overcome perennial problems associated with effective knowledge sharing, but also to elucidate the mechanisms by which such technologies affect knowledge sharing practices. In short, this research stands to unveil what happens when organizational communications that were once private become public and the consequences that this communication visibility can have for the organization as a whole. This research has high-impact potential for education, labor, and business policies as it considers strategies for retooling and reshaping the communication environments of organizations that are becoming increasingly distributed.
