Knowledge Sharing
Knowledge is mix of data, information, experience, values, ideas, intuition, expert insights and intelligence skills (Davenport and Prusak, 1998). There are two types of knowledge, explicit and tacit knowledge (Hamel, 1991). Tacit knowledge is what resides in people’s mind e.g. experience. Explicit knowledge exists in the form of physical material hence it can be easily captured and transmitted (Stevens et al., 2010). External Knowledge can be coded and stored in a database to be easily accessed by anyone in organization (Civi, 2000). Knowledge sharing occurs between certain group members using a form of communication in order to acquire knowledge from each other. Davenport and Prusak (1998) stated that the success of knowledge sharing depends on the successful transfer, absorb and use of the knowledge, which in turn creates positive changes in the behavior of the knowledge receiver.
According to O'Dell & Grayson (1998) knowledge management is a strategy used to help people to improve their potential and upgrade the performance of the organization by sharing knowledge among them, thus the right people can get the right knowledge at the right time (Charnkit, 2010). Gold et al. (2001) stated that KM has main four processes starts by the capture of embedded knowledge (O’Dell and Grayson, 1998). Then moving to the second step which is conversion process by moving from tacit knowledge to external knowledge by informal interaction and discussions which is called knowledge transfer (Tan, 2011). Knowledge transfer requires group cooperation to share knowledge and achieve common benefits (Syed-Ikhsan and Rowland, 2004). The third step is disseminating knowledge by making knowledge available, which is considered a very important to achieve the required benefits of this knowledge in the right time (Syed-Ikhsan and Rowland, 2004). Finally, knowledge utilization which refers to events and activities related to the application of knowledge (Tan, 2011).