Erschienen in:28th International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), December 2007
Umfang:
1 Online-Ressource (17 p)
Sprache:
Englisch
DOI:
10.2139/ssrn.962535
Identifikator:
Entstehung:
Anmerkungen:
Beschreibung:
We extend March's model of exploration and exploitation to consider how environmental turbulence impacts organizational knowledge in hierarchies of varying size and depth. We then evaluate additional effects of a knowledge management (KM) system that collects and shares knowledge from expert individuals in an organization. We find that in the absence of personnel turnover, a management strategy of high exploitation and low exploration for a multi-tier hierarchical organization, representative of a top-down knowledge management strategy, reduces the accuracy of average individual knowledge levels compared to alternative strategies. The magnitude of this reduction in accuracy increases as the number of tiers in a hierarchical organization increase. Managers operating in a flat organization will see less of a reduction compared to a multi-tier organization. Two weighted-least-squares regressions performed on two additional data sets corroborate this central observation: a bottom-up strategy demonstrates greater resiliency to environmental turbulence than a top-down knowledge management strategy for hierarchical organizations