The Human Side of Knowledge Management

The emergence of knowledge management in the 1990s made it clear that information management was not enough to achieve organizational strategy. As multiple authors have documented, knowledge is information in agents’ heads. Information without people is static. Individuals dynamize information and convert it into knowledge. If knowledge implies that people acquire, process, create, share, and apply knowledge, a fundamental question is why some individuals want to do it and some do not. From the organizational behavior field, human actions depend on individual variables and environmental conditions, including organizational variables. The two dimensions are equally important; however, in this chapter, only three of the most relevant human variables were described based on research results: attitudes, self-efficacy, and trust. Attitudes are evaluations people make of others, things, situations, and concepts. Many publications confirm the relationship between attitudes and knowledge management, especially in the knowledge sharing component. This chapter presented some of them. Self-efficacy is an individual’s confidence in his or her abilities to execute a particular task. Self-efficacy influences how people think, feel, and act and therefore their achievements. There is a positive relationship between self-efficacy and knowledge sharing, and some studies were presented. Trust is a belief, assessment, or assumption about an exchange partner that results from the partner’s expertise, reliability, benevolence, and deliberateness. Trust has a positive impact on knowledge sharing. When there is trust within a group, the intensity of knowledge sharing increases.