EKSPRESS Survey Concluded

A BIG thank you to all survey participants and everyone who's helped to shape, develope, review, revise, and administer the survey. The analysis will soon be completed and a copy of the results will be posted here. The donations will be made to the respective agencies soon.

Call for Participation-Details

If you are interested in improving the management of your knowledge workers, this study provides a good assessment of the personal preferences & the socio-cultural factors of the work force.

We'll provide a detailed analysis of the "knowledge culture" in your comapny. This would help your company to be more efficient in managing both the knowledge & the knowledge workers.

The research is supported by the National University of Singapore. We do not charge the participants. For every completed survey form that your employees submit, we'll donate SGD$2 to the International Red Cross.

To know more about this study, send me an email at awiefoong@yahoo.com or h.w.foong@nus.edu.sg.






















Send me an email at awiefoong@yahoo.com or h.w.foong@nus.edu.sg to obtain a copy of the slides.

A Survey of Employees’ Knowledge Sharing Preferences (Call for Participation)

looking for more companies n individuals to participate in my survey: An assessment on the employees' knowledge sharing preferences.
We are conducting a survey to assess the culture of knowledge sharing within firm. The key questions are WHY and WHY-DON'T people share knowledge at work. In our framework we hope to capture the personal preferences of the employees, the social interactions among employees, and the interactions between employees and the organizational systems. It's beneficial especially to companies that want to understand and improve their knowledge works and works on knowledge.

For companies that are interested in this subject area, we are ready to present our ideas to the managers concerned. If we can then reach a mutual goal, we can proceed further into the survey assessment. Details of participant's benefits and commitment can be found in the attached document .At the moment there're two companies that have confirmed their participations. There are also two very likely participants from outside Singapore. I'm keeping my fingers crossed... :D

Fundamental Motives Profile: A precondition to KM

I quote this from Dinesh Tantri's Organic KM: KM & "Peripheral Vision":

"Before sinking a million dollars into deploying a "workflow enabled collaborative KM system" it makes sense to bring in a business anthropologist to identify all cultural enablers and disablers in the organization. This is crucial because while a Social Network Analysis may bring to surface the disconnect between two groups, for any intervention to have a sustainable impact we need to dig deeper and attack the underlying problems.

To do this we need a trained anthropologist. Remember the devil is in the details (your complex cultural DNA). The results of doing this cultural audit could go a long way in improving overall organizational effectiveness. For instance, the anthropologist may discover that there is a "blame" culture or there is "fear" or that too many executives wear ambition on their sleeves and so on. These pieces of the cultural DNA need to be repaired. Change & adoption are always going to remain a challenge as long as we keep pretending that the next wave of tools and services will solve all our woes. IMHO, knowledge sharing like many other good things in life needs to be an emergent behavior - driven by positive strands in your cultural DNA."

-- Dinesh Tantri

I might like to offer a lil' assistant in how we could learn to understand the people in the company:

1. Do an assessment of their fundamental psychological motives using the Reiss's Profile.

(See life between the ivory tower n reality: Fundamental Motives and Motivation to Share Knowledge at Workplace)

2. Once you have the profiles of your employees, you should know what to do; else you shouldn't be the one that manage your employees. Hey, I'm not the manager here, you are! :)

Happy managing knowledge!

Looking for participants for Knowledge Sharing Motivation survey

looking for more companies n individuals to participate in my survey: An assessment on the employees' knowledge sharing preferences.

We are conducting a survey to assess the culture of knowledge sharing within firm. The key questions are WHY and WHY-DON'T people share knowledge at work. In our framework we hope to capture the personal preferences of the employees, the social interactions among employees, and the interactions between employees and the organizational systems. It's beneficial especially to companies that want to understand and improve their knowledge works and works on knowledge.

For companies that are interested in this subject area, we are ready to present our ideas to the managers concerned. If we can then reach a mutual goal, we can proceed further into the survey assessment. Details of participant's benefits and commitment can be found in the attached document .

At the moment there're two companies that have confirmed their participations. There are also two very likely participants from outside Singapore. I'm keeping my fingers crossed...

:D

Fundamental Motives and Motivation to Share Knowledge at Workplace

The underlying motives behind human actions or behaviors are multifaceted, i.e. there are many fundamental motives that drive our behavior. In fact, there are 16 of them according to Steven Reiss of the Ohio State Univ. People differ in WHAT they desire, and HOW MUCH they desire for these 16 fundamental motives.Like any other motivated behaviors, knowledge sharing can be seen as a way to fulfill some of our fundamental motives. The higher its potential is in satiating our fudamental motives, the more motivated we will be to share knowledge.

The route from knowledge sharing to satiation of fundamental motives is not always direct, however. For instance, knowledge sharing may lead to improved work performance, which in turn leads to improved rewards (various forms). These rewards would in turn satiate some of of fundamental motives (e.g. status motive). Another example is that knowledge sharing might lead to improved interpersonal relationships with significant others. This will in turn lead to the fulfillment of some other fundamental motives (e.g. acceptance motive). When knowledge sharing leads to one or a few intermediary outcomes and finally to the satiation of fundamental motives (e.g. KS=>Performance=>Rewards=>Fulfillment of Status Motive), I call it "extrinsically motivated" knowledge sharing behavior. When knowledge sharing is in itself a way to satiate fundamental motives (e.g. KS=> fulfillment of Citizenship Motive), it is an "intrinsically motivated" knowledge sharing behavior.

Since human fundamental motives are multifaceted (see Steven Reiss's book "Who Am I"), there are many ways that knowledge sharing can be motivated. But first, a good understanding of the employees' fundamental motives profile is warranted. A unitary assumption about the "general" nature of human motivation (e.g. human beings are, by nature, protective of their knowledge; or that they are all motivated by challenging jobs et al.) will normally result in mixed outcomes: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

I'm currently working on a research project in this area. If you are interested to know more, you may contact me at h.w.foong@nus.edu.sg.