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Informal social networks in an organization
Contents
Introduction
Informal social networks in an organization, Knowledge management is a key tool that the contemporary organizations are bound to use in the post-industrialization era. In fact, in today’s competitive business environment, the ability of successfully managing the organizational information, sorting it out and making the best use of it, are few of the defining aspects of the superiority of one organization over the other (Rubenstein-Montano et al., 2001).
The organizations today incur a great deal of their costs on the management of information. In some cases it is being outsourced which is why, it has also become a lucrative business for those who seek an opportunity in doing so (Ruggles, 2009). The research and development departments in different organizations are technically the offspring of the concept of knowledge management which was introduced back in 1980s (Dalkir, 2013). The relationship of knowledge management with decision making capabilities of managers, innovation and continuous collection of data and its simulation, all with respect to the informal organizational social networks, is paramount and will be discussed in the later part of the report.
This brief report consists of an evaluation of the organizational social networks setup towards the creation, sharing and integration of knowledge within the organizations. The social networks in the organization can be classified as formal and informal. The simple distinction between the two is that the formal social networks are defined by the hierarchies, the way the employees in an organization are supposed to interact (Allen, James & Gamlen, 2007).
A simple example could be that every employee in an organization has a line manager to respond to or the territory managers in the sales team are supposed to report to the area managers who in turn are answerable to the regional managers and who finally report to the sales director. This is a simple depiction of how the formal networks in an organization work. But there is another network in the organization, the informal network which negates this pattern and can comprise of any social interaction between the employees of the organization. The informal social networks exist in the organization because despite being part of an organization, the employees or the human beings do not seize to be social beings (Waldstrom, 2001:7).
This report will further discuss the informal social network practices in the contemporary organizations, specifically the communities of practice and the cross communities. The concepts will first be defined, analysed and then will be evaluated with reference to their relationship with the effective knowledge management in an organization especially the sharing, integration and creation of knowledge. Although the basic purpose of the essay is to carry out an academic debate and evaluate the utility of the aforementioned practices of informal networks in an organization for the knowledge management capabilities of an organization, it is important to first discuss the knowledge management in detail and determine its importance in the wake of current business era. Besides referring to the academic content, these informal networks will also be analysed based upon the writer’s personal knowledge of a specific organization i.e. Unilever, due to the experience of working in that organization.
Knowledge Management
We exist in the post industrialization era where the products and services are not only growing fast but are also changing in order to perfectly match the customers’ needs. But to do that, it is important that the needs of the customers are recorded, understood and then the relevant innovative ideas are used to design the products and services to gain a competitive edge over the other businesses that are also in a race to capture the market share (Darroch, 2005). Within the overall subject of knowledge management, understanding the needs and wants of customers being the keys to innovation, are considered to be the basic aspect of knowledge management (Yew Wong, 2005). Thus, it can be safely said that in today’s competitive environment, knowledge management is the major competitive edge that the organizations have over each other.
This concept was initiated during the 1990s. The complex knowledge management was once a crude concept and one of earliest definitions of the concept being put forward by Davenport (1994) regards it as a process which involves the effective recording, distribution and usage of the knowledge for the benefit of an organization. This clearly was a vague and simple explanation, however, according to the contemporary interpretation the concept is more explicitly defined as a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an enterprise’s information assets (Koenig, 2012).
Koenig (2012) further categorizes the information assets mentioned in the definition as databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously un-captured expertise and experiences of individual workers. The importance of knowledge management in today’s dynamic business environment is undeniable. Quast (2012) has discussed the importance of knowledge management for contemporary organizations and considers the concept’s main benefit its contribution towards the decision making capabilities of an organization. The business decisions involve heavy investments be these related to the establishment of plant, a pricing strategy or a product mix to counter the competition. The availability of information is just a basic issue but the major factor that influences the availability of the information is the sorting out of relevant information and cutting through it to reach a conclusive, well informed decision (Prusak, 2009). The example of General Electric’s Corporate Executive Council (CEC) is a fine example of how knowledge management…
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