Knowledge management and organizational learning

An international research perspective

The Authors

Steven Walczak, The Business School, University of Colorado, Denver, Colorado, USA

Abstract

Purpose – This article aims to examine international studies of knowledge management (KM) and organizational learning (OL).

Design/methodology/approach – The approach takes the form of a literature review of KM and OL research that focuses on a business or businesses located outside traditional Western economies.

Findings – There is a need to increase research that examines KM and OL existing in different and multiple countries. Additionally, cultural factors should be included in KM and OL research analysis.

Research limitations/implications – The limitation is that the only practical empirical evidence is supplied through the highlighted articles in the literature review.

Originality/value – The article shows that, in order to increase the application of KM and OL research world-wide, national culture and other geopolitical influences need to be represented in KM and OL models and measurement instruments.

Article Type:

Conceptual paper

Keyword(s):

Learning organizations; National cultures; Knowledge management; Europe.

Journal:

The Learning Organization

Volume:

Number:

Year:

2008

pp:

486-494

Copyright ©

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

ISSN:

0969-6474

Introduction

Knowledge management (KM) and organizational learning (OL) certainly cannot be considered as new topics, with the original concepts close to two decades old and OL practices dating back well beyond that (Senge, 1990; Wiig, 1994). The practices of KM and OL have been shown to improve organizational performance (Cavaleri et al., 2005; Davenport and Prusak, 1998) and thus are worth investigating to refine our understanding of how these management and practice concepts improve organizational outcomes.

While KM and OL have been extensively researched in developed Western economies, the global nature of knowledge available through internet applications and internet-based knowledge resources creates the need to examine these concepts in developing and also more developed Eastern nations. A major criticism of KM and OL definitions when applied to developing knowledge economies is it's foundation in “hard-nosed American/Anglo-Saxon economic principles of organizational effectiveness” (Nyhan et al., 2004). Cavaleri et al. (2005), p. 54) second this notion indirectly by stating that “any rigidly held worldview, although seductive on the surface, is inherently limited and likely to cause leaders their own demise”. Thus, research examining and advocating the development of KM and OL in countries with developing knowledge economies must be flexible and able to adapt to incorporate cultural and political differences.

Smith (2006) indicates that published research on OL in transnational and multinational organizations is currently very sparse. The purpose of this article is to perform a condensed literature review of international KM and OL research, where international is meant to imply existing or developing KM and OL practices in organizations located in countries outside of the USA and western and northern Europe (e.g. the UK, France, Germany) and to recommend research directions for evaluating KM and OL in developing knowledge economies.

Knowledge economy defined

The term “knowledge economy” is used throughout this paper and as such bears defining. I will define the knowledge economy of a country as it's level of recognition and corresponding dependence on both tacit and explicit knowledge as a critical factor in conducting both short-term and long-term business. This implies that as the knowledge economy grows in a specific country, then the number of businesses, government institutions and other organizations within that country will have active KM and OL programs or initiatives.

Previous work has show that national financial economies typically follow an inverted u-shaped curve with respect to their level of development and subsequent reliance on international information signals (Walczak, 1999). Similarly, knowledge economies will grow in their dependence on KM and OL research methods from other more developed knowledge economies until they reach a level of understanding that will enable them to develop unique and individualized theoretical foundations and practices. Thus, the dependence of a country on international KM theories and methodologies follows the pattern illustrated in Figure 1. Support for this premise comes from the research of Ordóñez de Pablos (2002) who claims at the time of the reported research that Middle Eastern and Asian firms trail behind European firms in the measurement of intellectual capital, but that these other non-Western knowledge economies are interested in learning from the established methodologies existing in Europe.

Although the knowledge economy is distinct from the financial economy of a country, since a highly industrialized nation need not have any formal KM or OL practices in place and conversely an agrarian society may utilize communities of practice or other forms of KM to optimize crop yields, there does tend to be a correlation. The more industrialized a society becomes, the more reliant on information it becomes and consequently on KM and OL processes to optimize the utilization of this information for competitive advantage. Service-oriented financial economies are also extremely reliant on information and knowledge.

Now that the stage has been set to view varying countries with respect to their reliance on information and knowledge for conducting business, or their knowledge economy level, we can evaluate how these countries compare to other countries at different locations on the knowledge economy curve.

The current state of research

International research in developing knowledge economies may be classified into three distinct groups:

Research that utilizes Western KM and OL theory and analyzes firms with respect to expected western organizational outcomes.
Research that utilizes Western KM and OL theory, but highlights differences between international organizations and their western counterparts.
Research that attempts to develop non-Western theory to accommodate geopolitical and national cultural differences.

Each of the first two research classifications is currently being performed and this article will focus primarily on the second.

Western theory and western-based analysis of KM and OL

There are numerous examples of the first classification, which uses a purely Western methodology (that is, utilizes Western-developed theories and analysis techniques and highlights concordance with existing theory or similarities with previously studied Western businesses). It may be that this research style is used frequently due to the publication outlets existing in these Western countries. Examples of such research include research that has been performed in: China (Du et al., 2007), Switzerland (Blackmore, 2004), Hong Kong (Law and Ngai, 2008), and the Netherlands (Van de Hoof and de Ridder, 2004), to name a few. The last three could all be classified as developed knowledge economies however Hong Kong would have Eastern philosophical foundations in an ideal research world.

The typical results following from this class of KM and OL research is the validation of the generalizability of existing Western-based KM and OL theories to businesses in worldwide settings.

Applied western theory looking to explain national cultural differences

The second class of research which is based on Western theories of KM and OL, but looks to explain differences in outcomes that rely on geo-political or national culture reasons is increasing. This type of research is growing out of necessity since much of the research briefly described in the previous section produced outcomes that conflicted with anticipated outcome norms based on Western-business cultures.

Much of the early research within this classification attempted to explain perceived outcome differences for specific nations by implying the inverted u-shaped learning curve for knowledge economies described earlier and claiming that the results were explained by the countries being in a “catch-up” phase of their economy, such as the work of Hegde and Shapira (2007) who analyze the perceived shortcomings of Malaysian firms in the specific area of product innovation.

Another common trait of the research that looks to explain perceived differences in KM and OL research is that the focus of the research is either an individual organization or a collection of organizations all from within a single country. Table I present a brief summary of some of this research, including the relevant findings of KM and OL differences between the business(es) in the country listed versus more established Western businesses. It should be noted that while the differences from expected Western outcomes are being highlighted in Table I, many of these research outcomes also noted similarities with anticipated Western OL or KM outcomes in other areas than those highlighted in Table I. Those rows in Table I that do not specify a country are for research that was more of a high level overview or purely theoretical paper without focus on a specific country.

An interesting observation form the study by Aramburu et al. (2006) is that those organizations that were deemed to have the most productive OL also appeared to move towards a more Western decentralized decision-making methodology. This observation is supportive of the inverted u-shaped knowledge economy proposition.

As noted, all of the research reported in Table I that was either applied or empirical research, is performed in a single country. While these types of research are beneficial for identifying differences between the specific country and expected Western outcomes, I believe that a much stronger case for the need for cultural differences in KM and OL methodologies will come from comparative research across businesses in multiple countries (not necessarily transnational, but rather individual businesses in differing countries). Research of this type is very scarce. Ordóñez de Pablos (2002) conducted a study that primarily utilized intellectual capital reports produced by companies located in numerous countries from around the world, including India, Israel, Korea, and several European countries. As previously mentioned, her work indicated that businesses in less developed knowledge economies were looking to gain experience and processes from practice in more developed knowledge economies.

Two other studies have been performed more recently which attempt to examine explicit differences in OL or KM across different firms located in different parts of the world. Ma et al. (2008) studied organizations in both China (Eastern and less developed knowledge economy) and Norway (Western and more developed knowledge economy) using a case-based research methodology to analyze differences in OL. They found significant differences between the two countries with respect to who the target of training was, how training was conducted, and when training was conducted. Dimovski et al. (2008) utilize a survey-based research to compare OL across Slovenia, Croatia, and Malaysia, all of which may be considered as less developed knowledge economies. They found that OL methods were very similar between Slovenia and Croatia, providing evidence for geographic cultural similarities supporting similar types of OL, at least within countries at similar locations on the knowledge economy scale. However, Slovenia and Croatia had significant differences from Malaysia with respect to the typical sources of knowledge and knowledge evaluation mechanisms, supporting differences across different cultures.

From the two previous cited research examples, it is clear that KM and OL processes and outcomes at business located in different countries with different cultural backgrounds differ. Future research is needed to try and disambiguate to what degree these KM and OL differences are required due to cultural and geopolitical factors or if some of these differences may simply be an artifact of these businesses residing at different locations on the knowledge economy scale.

Evolution of new non-western theories

The third classification poses an interesting. Research using non-Western foundations or theories has already been used in the earlier stages of KM and OL research. Specifically the seminal works by Nonaka and colleagues that addressed KM in Japanese organizations and described the Eastern philosophical underpinnings of KM practices in Japan, including the concept of “Ba” (Nonaka and Konno, 1998; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). Other cultural mandates exist in various parts of the world including the concept of guanxi in China for social hierarchy (Ordóñez de Pablos, 2005) and the Philippine cultural value of treating the workplace as part of the extended family and hiya (shame) that can be brought to the family. It must be recognized that these national cultural values are a part of the life of the workers located in these countries and KM and OL research must incorporate these ideals into any evaluation mechanisms.

Interestingly, Cavaleri et al. (2005) claim that the US research in OL is beginning to incorporate Eastern traditions by shifting focus from explicit knowledge to tacit knowledge. Thus it is interesting that the established KM and OL theories of the West have finally recognized the need to be adaptable and may end up integrating theory and philosophy from other parts of the world. Numerous researchers have commented on their perception that the utilization of Western-based theories of KM and OL do not work well in other parts of the world and that a reason for this is differences in national culture (Hegde and Shapira, 2007; Khadra and Rawabdeh, 2006; Syed-Ikhsan and Rowland, 2004).

Looking forward, perhaps this is just another version of the u-shaped curve, where some of the original components of KM and OL theory came from the East. These were then replaced by a reliance on explicit and external change directions, predicated by the desire to measure the intangible asset of knowledge within the organization. However, now a much greater emphasis, not only on the utilization of tacit knowledge and internally directed change, but also on the incorporation of national cultural elements in KM and OL methodologies and measurement criteria are again starting to emerge.

Where do we go from here?

As just mentioned, the need to incorporate cultural heritage into KM and OL research is starting to be recognized by researchers worldwide. This is not unique to KM and OL research, as the need for developing web-based information repositories and search engines that allow navigation and delivery of material in native languages has been cited as a significant need fro web development (Chung, 2008; Chung et al., 2008), with Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish speaking populations being underrepresented. The development of language and culturally friendly discovery and distribution of information will also certainly assist KM and OL initiatives.

One of the main objectives of future research should be to investigate KM and OL across national boundaries and compare practices from different cultures and knowledge economies. These comparisons will serve to identify shortcomings in existing theoretical foundations of KM and OL and help to identify different ways of thinking about KM and OL from a business application perspective. Including cultural factors will increase the applicability of proposed KM and OL models to businesses throughout the world and identify necessary changes to models when shifting national cultures, which is particularly important for transnational and multinational organizations.

As the world becomes ever more dynamic, at least with respect to information availability and financial economies, it is important for KM and OL research to also become adaptable to be able to respond to the different needs of different organizations located throughout the world.

Figure 1Knowledge economy external dependence curve

Table ISummary of research that applied Western methods, but highlights differences

References

Aramburu, N., Sáenz, J., Rivera, O. (2006), "Organizational learning, change process, and evolution of management systems: empirical evidence from the Basque Region", The Learning Organization, Vol. 13 No.5, pp.434-54.