Knowledge Sharing : a case study analysis within a company covered through organizational culture, motivation and opportunities to share

Details

Supervisors

de Viron, Françoise

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences de gestion

Abstract

It is largely accepted that we are in an era when information and knowledge are a critical issue for companies. The creation and effective sharing of knowledge is the source of sustainable organizational advantage. Within this context, knowledge intensive firms developed a strong culture of knowledge creation and sharing. McKinsey & Company established Knowledge Centers to concentrate the knowledge in strategic points as the source of an organizational advantage. They currently employ more than 1.950 knowledge workers, distributed across the organization. Our project takes place in the Brussels McKinsey Knowledge Center located in Louvain-la-Neuve. Our mission is to assess the current situation concerning knowledge sharing within the center. Thus, we ran a survey among the employees to detect potential features that could be subject to improvement. We start our approach by setting the thesis problem and our motivations to run this project. Then, we develop our theoretical framework. We define the concepts inherent to this case study and present the Ipe model (2003) used to build this framework. The model concerns the factors that influence knowledge sharing. These are the organizational culture, the nature of knowledge, the motivation to share and the opportunities to share. We review each component of this model to slightly adapt it through other authors’ distinctions. Then, we explain our project context. Thus, we describe briefly McKinsey & Company and trace the life history of the knowledge management at the firm over the years. Afterwards, we present the conceptual model used to run our analysis and explain the methodology applied through the goals set and the data collection and analysis tools. Finally, we proceed to the analysis of the data collected. We develop the global results of this analysis before showing more specific results related to the different categories of employees involved. We conclude this project by comparing the main results observed with the goals set.