ORGANIZATIONAL INFLUENCE ON EFFECTIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE APPLICATION BY KNOWLEDGE WORKERS: AN ATTENTION-BASED APPROACH

Abstract

Although there is hardly any doubt that actual application of knowledge rather than a vast repository of knowledge is the source of company’s competitive advantage, most of existing knowledge management research focuses on knowledge creation and sharing, not on knowledge application. In the paper presented we shall be concerned with factors affecting the effectivity of knowledge application by knowledge workers, where knowledge application is thought to be the process of relating available knowledge to data / information specific to a task, and ‘attention’ is taken as a proxy for the effectivity of this process. Particularly, we are concerned with factors at the organizational level: rather than “Why some knowledge workers seem to be more effective at knowledge application?” we ask “Why some places knowledge workers seem to be more effective at knowledge application?” Besides a review of relevant concepts we outline ways how to approach this topic empirically.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.em.17.2.2204