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Abstract This paper reports the results of a qualitative study of motivation and barriers to employee participation in virtual knowledge-sharing communities of practice at Caterpillar Inc., a Fortune 100, multinational corporation. The study indicates that, when employees view knowledge as a public good belonging to the whole organization, knowledge flows easily. However, even when individuals give the highest priority to the interests of the organization and of their community, they tend to shy away from contributing knowledge for a variety of reasons. Specifically, employees hesitate to contribute out of fear of criticism, or of misleading the community members (not being sure that their contributions are important, or completely accurate, or relevant to a specific discussion). To remove the identified barriers, there is a need for developing various types of trust, ranging from the knowledge-based to the institution-- based trust. Future research directions and implications for KM practitioners are formulated.
Keywords Communities of practice, Knowledge management, Trust
Introduction
In recent writing on knowledge management, the most often mentioned strategy for bringing the human side into the KM equation is that of virtual communities of practice enabled by online interactive technologies (Cortada and Woods, 2000; Liedtka, 1999; Phillips and Bonner, 2000). The latest reports from the field suggest that virtual communities of practice are becoming a KM tool of choice for an increasing number of multinational corporations, including such well-known industry leaders as Hewlett Packard (Davenport, 1996), British Petroleum (Cohen and Prusak, 1996), Chevron, Ford, Xerox, Raytheon, IBM (Ellis, 2001), and Shell (Haimila, 2001), to name a few. Despite the proliferation of virtual communities of practice in business organizations around the world, very little is known about factors leading to their success or failure. One of the critical factors determining a virtual community's success is its members' motivation to actively participate in community knowledge generation and sharing activities. Earlier studies have demonstrated that employees often resist sharing their knowledge (Ciborra and Patriota, 1998), that knowledge does not flow easily even when an organization makes a concerted effort to facilitate knowledge exchange (Szulanski, 1996), that the success of knowledge exchange depends on the organizational KM system's social and technological attributes (Holsthouse, 1998), and on organizational culture and climate (De Long and Fahey, 2000). However, the reasons why...