A Study on Community of Practice and the Knowledge Management Effectiveness of Enterprises

• Main Authors: Hsu, Kai-Wen, 許凱雯
• Other Authors: : Wu, Bing-Eng
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2003
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/86378974706738552372

碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 管理學研究所 === 91 === Knowledge is crucial and a worthwhile investment for modern business to gain competitive advantage. Superior knowledge management system emphasizes that the knowledge is internally created, overall involved, and shared by people in the organization. A brand new type of organization allows its people to share knowledge, create knowledge, and learn, which is dubbed Community of Practice, and CoP hereafter. The purpose of this study is to portray the types of CoPs, identify their effectiveness, possible hindrance in development of CoPs, raise motivator that facilitates the development of CoP mechanism, and find out the conditions for matching CoP and knowledge management. The nature of this study is exploratory and eight in-depth cases were selected, including four companies in the high-tech industry, and four companies in the traditional industry. The important constructs and propositions are inductive from indepth-interviews. The result shows that CoPs are beneficial to internal growth of business and a worthwhile investment. I suggest that enterprises to invest more on the CoP, shape opened enterprise’s culture, give more resources needed that can make the community of practice generate actual effectiveness to the organization’s knowledge management system. On the other hand, this study adds a middle variable in the initial research framework, that will influence the effectiveness of the community of practice and the knowledge management system, this middle variable is “the schedule of introducing the community of practice”, that’s, introducing the community of practice earlier, due to the professional activities (i.e. education and training) and the mental adjustment of the employees, that can reduce the obstacles and resistances of introducing the community of practice, these activities can make the effectiveness of the community of practice and knowledge management better, so this study suggests enterprises to grasp the timing of introducing the community of practice to fit the tide of knowledge-based era.