Besides the effects of intrinsic motivation, prosocial motivation, and outcome expectation to understand and determine the behaviour of employees, there is a further important issue to be considered according to social cognitive theory: “self-efficacy”.
Self-efficacy describes the personal judgement of one’s own capabilities to perform successfully a dedicated task. Albert Bandura summarizes in [Bandura1977]:
“Expectations of personal efficacy determine whether coping behavior will be initiated, how much effort will be expended, and how long it will be sustained in the face of obstacles and aversive experiences.”
It is important to note that self-efficacy does not describe the personal skills, but the personal judgment of what can be achieved in the light of personal capabilities within the context of the environment. Thus, self-efficacy is a further essential factor which determines an employee´s choice of activities, especially when facing obstacles and barriers.
Employees who don´t believe that dedicated tasks can be accomplished by their personal capabilities tend to avoid these tasks (low self-efficacy), whereas people who judge their capabilities higher (high
self-efficacy) tend to spend the effort to accomplish a specific task, even when facing difficulties and barriers [Doerner2012].
Following this understanding, [Doerner2012, page 15] defines an “innovative self-efficacy” as a “a person´s belief in their capabilities to produce innovative outcomes.”
Nadin Dörner identified in her study [Doerner2012] that outcome expectations and self-efficacy are not independent of each other. She states that outcome expectations do not independently contribute to innovative work behaviour. Self-efficacy is the important determining factor which influences also the outcome expectation.
Creativity and implementation are neither synonymous nor necessarily positively related. Even when creativity may be negatively received within an organisation, individuals can improve the probability that ideas are implemented. When employees are motivated and have self-confidence, and understand the disruptive innovation aspects better, several potentially innovation jeopardizing effects within the organisation can be balanced. In order to create a culture, which supports an innovative attitude based on the positive motivation of individuals, corporate values should support objectives such as [Gundling2000, Massar2008]:
• support individual capabilities, • provide equal opportunity,
• encourage the initiatives of each and every employee, and • respect the dignity and worth of individuals.
According to Nadin Dörner [Doerner2012], outcome expectations do not independently contribute to innovative work behaviour. In this context “self-efficacy” is a key characteristic for employees´ innovative work behaviour. Self-efficacy is the important determining factor which influences also the outcome expectation, and is the basic motivation factor to overcome stringent hurdles within organisations when acting innovatively.
An employee´s self-efficacy can be stimulated and increased by several organisational and management means such as self-evaluations, organisational support for innovation, and co-worker exchange [Doerner2012, page 89]. In more detail concrete measures are [Doerner2012]:
• communicate high performance expectations and express confidence in the employees capabilities;
• give positive feedback on innovative behaviour; • managers should serve as a role model;
• the organisation should create an innovation-supportive environment;
• the organisation gives the employees the possibility for vocational training and experiencing communication and discussions to improve their interpersonal skills;
• the organisation should encourage employees to establish relationships with co-workers and create an environment that encourages social bonding through open ad understandable communication;
• provide employees with the possibility to observe various role models and sharing of experiences with co-workers;
Barriers to Successful Knowledge Sharing within
5.5.
Organisations
To summarize the discussion so far, effective and efficient communication and information exchange to let knowledge flow through the organisation are the fundamentals of any successful organisation. In this context it is important to note that, as elaborated above, in contrast to other objects, knowledge cannot simply be shifted around and easily stored and retrieved.
Expertise is largely tacit and embedded in the context of being used [Ackerman2003, page 21]. This difficulty arises from both cognitive and motivational issues. Motivation, self-confidence, and ability are essential factors for an innovative behaviour of employees [Ram1987, p. 208]; respectively the lower these factors are the higher is the “resistance to change” (see Section 6.4 below).
Referring to the literature discussed we can identify the following issues as essential barriers for a successful knowledge transfer. All those effects might potentially jeopardize effective communications process and thus the innovation management process within a firm:
1. Partial knowledge [Snowden2002];
2. Cost of codification and knowledge transfer [Snowden2002]; 3. Group identity [Ackerman2003a, Ackerman2003b];
4. Outcome expectations and risk judgement for personal objectives [Baer2012]; 5. Risk to jeopardize existing personal relationships;
6. Missing trust among the communicating partners;
7. Missing cultural norms and no culture of reciprocity [Prusak2006];
8. Personal factors for stickiness of knowledge [Szulanski2003, Durant-Law2012]; 9. Too much rules prevent information sharing [Ackerman2003a, Ackerman2003b]; We will discuss these issues in more detail in the following.
5.5.1.
Partial Knowledge
Experts often „know“, but cannot explain why [Ackerman2003a, Ackerman2003b]. It is not always possible to fully understand an information domain exhaustively. Therefore, knowledge tends to be incomplete or partial. The great majority of real life problems have to be solved based on limited availability of information and a finite amount of time, which considerably affects any decision- making process. Therefore, “know-how-much” and “know-when” are important assets for any business decision-making process.
In addition to this basic “knowledge problem”, there are additional factors that determine the information transfer process [Snowden2002]:
(1) Knowledge transfer depends on the willingness and motivation of the individual; i.e. it can only take place on a voluntary basis and it cannot be imposed for the very simple reason that we can never truly know if someone is passing on all of his/her knowledge. We can only verify whether it complied with a defined process or quality standard.
(2) We can always know more than we can say and we will always say more than we can write down. The nature of knowledge is such that we always know, or are capable of knowing more than we have the physical time or the conceptual ability to articulate. When speaking, producing a PowerPoint presentation, writing short notes or even a whole book, it will always just be a subset of the available knowledge of a person.
In addition, it is important to note that knowledge development takes place through the process of saying and writing something different. The process of writing something down is referred to as reflective knowledge; it involves both adding and taking away from the actual experience or original thought. Reflective knowledge has a high value but it is time-
consuming and results in a loss of control over its subsequent use.
Improving the effectiveness of decision making in a business context is a crucial objective for a successful business operation. Thus, knowledge management approaches usually focus on managing knowledge with the ultimate goal to make sure that the right information (what), is available for the right person (who) at the right time (when) and to find out how much information is necessary to make the right decision. But this implies Taylor’s view that we can know with certainty where all relevant what-who-when takes place – but this is the problem – we often don’t or will ever know given the numerous specifics of any employee encounter with the world. This leads to the next essential issue of partial knowledge.
(3) We only know what we know when we need to know it. Human knowledge is deeply
contextual: it is triggered by circumstances. To be able to understand what people know, we have to recreate the same context. Thus, we have to ask a sensible question within a context, to determine what someone knows. To summarize, even if we are willing to transfer our knowledge and we know what we know, we cannot specify in advance what we need to know as an organisation and when we need to know it! Therefore, we have to deal with a basic uncertainty. This stresses the importance of “know-when” and “know-how-much” knowledge.
Finally, it is important to note that, especially in the organisational and business context, the main limitation is represented by the amount of time available to collect, process, and interpret data and information. Thus, managers always have to judge how much knowledge is necessary to make business decisions, as “know-how-much knowledge” is of crucial importance in a corporate context.