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spent in such meetings. For example, one organization set up a series of expensive
employee lounges fi lled with computers that were linked up to the organizational
knowledge base. However, on any given day, these lounges were empty. The reason
was that employees who spent time there were subject to comments such as “ wow —
you must not have much work to do if you have time to spare. ” When senior man-
agement took visitors around for a site visit of the offi ce, an e-mail memo was sent
out ahead of time to warn employees to be hard at work at their workstations and not
“ chatting in the lounges ” lest the visitors leave with the wrong perception of the
company. The message was very clear. Management may have built the physical
knowledge-sharing places, but they did not provide employees with the clear message
that time spent sharing knowledge was time that was productively spent. Similar
examples are often found in organizations where employees are told to do KM activi-
ties outside of their normal working hours. In other words, KM is done in your spare
time, which conveys a view of KM activities as peripheral, secondary, or even hobby-
type activities when compared to “ real work. ”
The rewarding of knowledge hoarding is another common barrier to the cultural
change needed for effective KM implementations. An example is any science-based
organization where recognition, performance appraisals, and promotion criteria are
all linked to what has been accomplished by being the fi rst and by being the only one
who thought of a great new idea, product, or process. As long as your career prospects
are enhanced if you do not share knowledge, cultural change will not occur. To bring
about cultural change, it is imperative to integrate knowledge-sharing behaviors in
performance evaluation criteria. Management can also help by publicly rewarding
examples of collaboration, good teamwork, and knowledge reuse wherever possible.
An example of a KM incentive strategy at Hill and Knowlton is explored in further
detail (box 7.9).
Absorptive capacity refers to the individual and/or organizational openness to
change and innovation, and the capability or preparedness for being able to integrate
it. The term originally referred to the prior related knowledge that a fi rm already pos-
sesses by Cohen and Levinthal (1990) . If existing absorptive capacity is low in an
organization, it will be very diffi cult to carry out any signifi cant cultural changes. The
organization could augment its existing employee base by recruiting and hiring indi-
viduals who have been selected for their openness to new ideas, eagerness to learn,
and innovativeness in approach. The existing employees can be provided with aware-
ness seminars, creativity building workshops (e.g., thinking out of the box approaches),
and other training opportunities to give them a chance to reframe their perception of
themselves and of the planned cultural changes.