Factors Differed for Sharing and Accepting Co-Worker Knowledge

To their surprise, researchers have found that the factors that encouraged doctors and nurses to provide information to colleagues in 11 German hospitals differed from those that led them to obtain knowledge from colleagues. Doctors were more likely to provide information if they used the Internet on the job, felt empowered, and had been on the job a long time. They were more likely to learn from colleagues if they used databases and felt the hospital did things in a consistent way. Not surprisingly, the longer they were on the job, the less likely they were to go to co-workers for help. This is not simply a matter of ego, though, since you have to ask more about company procedures when you're new on the job. The only factor that improved both giving and seeking of knowledge from colleagues was whether they felt internally motivated to do good work (versus needing external rewards).

Nurses, too, were more likely to share knowledge when they used the Internet and were internally motivated. But for them, database use was linked to providing rather than obtaining knowledge. The authors note that most nurses had limited access to a Web-connected computer on the job, which might have prevented its use as a tool for gaining knowledge (by e-mail, for example). Tenure did not strongly raise the likelihood of providing knowledge for nurses, and as with doctors, it decreased the chance they would share with others.

Some manager warnings lurk in the findings. Nurses who were not satisfied with their pay were far less likely to share what they knew. Or the opposite may have been true: the more they shared, the less likely they were to be satisfied with their pay. (A correlation between two items does not tell you which came first.) Formal meetings were linked to higher sharing of knowledge, more so by nurses, but had no impact on obtaining of it. If you often hold meetings simply to "share information," you might be wasting time. And while you cannot force someone to become internally motivated, you can provide the other factor most consistently linked to knowledge giving and getting: work breaks! People shared more easily in that informal setting than in meetings.

The study was based on a survey built through interviews with doctors and nurses and analyzed with the help of focus groups. The survey data was from about 200 doctors and 800 nurses in a random sample "of all hospitals in North Rhine-Westphalia…"

Source: Wilkesmann, U., M. Wilkesmann, and A. Virgillito (09), "The Absence of Cooperation is Not Necessarily Defection: Structural and Motivational Constraints of Knowledge Transfer in a Social Dilemma Situation," Organization Studies 03(10):1141.