Knowledge Sharing in a Multi-cultural Setting

In recent decades, the importance of knowledge management to an organization has been recognized by the society, and leaders are more likely to introduce it into the management systems of their organizations, yet Wang and Noe (2010) claimed that the success of knowledge management initially depended on knowledge sharing, which was the fundamental of communication between employees. Hence, these questions will be aroused that what can influence knowledge sharing and how it can be influenced. This paper will have a comparative review of two published studies, which are Knowledge sharing in a multi-cultural setting: a case study (Ford & Chan, 2003) and Knowledge sharing and team trustworthiness: it’s all about social ties! (Wang et al., 2006), both authors have answered the questions ahead on the basis of their studies.

But while both of them give us explicit conclusions and generally support that knowledge sharing has a connection with social relationship, there are clear differences in the approach each takes to the study. Dr. Dianne P. Ford, who has published in the Handbook on Knowledge Management, illustrates a result that cross-cultural difference is an obstacle to share knowledge and there is a slight difference between intra-cultural knowledge sharing and inter-cultural knowledge sharing using case study and data analysis. (Ford & Chan, 2003) Dr. Wang and his colleagues seem to be more interested in the relationship between knowledge sharing and trust. They use the same methodology with Dr. Ford in the course of research to claim that trust plays an important role in knowledge sharing, but it also can be substituted by social tie and network in some specific context. (Wang et al., 2006)

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...g the view that when people meet a person they are not familiar with, they won’t talk too much, so there is little knowledge sharing. Unless after a while, a belief relationship built between them, they will share more knowledge. A social tie or network, I think, is only a bridge to bring people to meet others, but have not reached the high level of substituting trust.

Same with Ford and Chan, Wang et al. also use case study methodology and data analysis. But unlike the previous who choose the best site for the research, they use Wang’s working place, a technology research and development institution in Taiwan as the study site. (Wang et al., 2006) Therefore, all the study is about the knowledge sharing within an innovation team, which is a certain component of the whole organization or the society, greatly limits the scalability and extensibility of the results.