Reasons Why People Would Not Share Knowledge

A company’s culture reflects what people think and feel about the organization. Do they trust each other and their management, and are they willing to go out of the traditional bounds of the work culture to benefit the organization?

Software organizations need to realize that employees may feel possessive about their knowledge, and they may not be forthcoming in sharing it. After all, the knowledge they have is why they are valuable to the organization, why they are paid by the organization, and why they do not want to give that knowledge away. A term which is used these days is “capturing tacit knowledge”, which is similar to “picking your employees' brains.” This term sounds like software organizations are picking whatever their employees know. The “capturing emotion” might scare people into withholding their knowledge, thinking they will be expendable as soon as their employers have captured all of the knowledge they need. If this was the result of successful knowledge management, then everybody should be afraid of losing their job.

Here are several reasons why employees might be reluctant to share their knowledge:

1. Employees want the organization to be dependent on them. If they share the knowledge with others, they fear they will loose their “expert” status.

2. Some cultures encourage individualism and ban cooperative work and sharing. In such cultures it is harder to establish a successful knowledge management program. As a matter of fact, most Western schools do not encourage students to work together in the classroom or while doing homework, so most students have learned that sharing is cheating. In order to create a sharing culture, such values and manners have to be unlearned.

3. Employees might not be willing to share lessons learned because of their negative connotation. Lessons learned are based on incidents, some of which might be failures. Although the purpose is to learn from failures to avoid similar mistakes, many employees might fear that submitting negative lessons learned could be interpreted against them by management.

These are cultural issues that management must handle by creating a learning environment. Employees will, however, always be concerned with how management treats them, and the information that management has about them. Employees will react negatively if they fear that information will be used against them.