Abstract
This chapter examines issues of knowledge management and cultural knowledge in the context of Formula SAE student engineering teams. Approximately 500 student teams field a small formula-style racecar in a series of annual competitions held globally. Despite being small, student-run teams with limited resources and high organizational turnover, strong teams have developed strategies to sustain knowledge creation and work to build the team's cultural knowledge over multiple annual design cycles. This chapter highlights three knowledge management challenges: organizational renewal due to graduation of senior members, capturing vital yet departing tacit and explicit knowledge, and engaging multi-year and collaborative projects. The chapter recommends that strong faculty and institutional support can help FSAE teams develop into stable knowing organizations with deep tacit, explicit, and cultural knowledge bases.
TopBackground
Schein defines organizational culture as a pattern of shared basic assumptions that assists the group with adaptation and integration, and are perceived by the group to be worthy of dissemination to new members as the correct way to perceive the group’s problems and challenges (Schein, 1992). Organizational culture is the milieu which defines how an organization perceives and addresses problems and affects the overall working climate and behavior of the organization (Saffold, 1988).
With respect to knowledge management, organizational culture defines the social context of what knowledge has value, how new knowledge should be created, validated and shared, and what tools and technologies are best suited to capture and disseminate knowledge created by the organization (De Long & Fahey, 2000). While knowledge management does investigate the use information technology as a facilitative tool to capture and disseminate explicit knowledge, knowledge management research has evolved to understand the overall information ecology of an organization (Nonaka & Konno, 2008). An organization’s cultural knowledge helps define a collective identity, purpose and orientation of an organization and informs sensemaking, knowledge creation and decision making, the core information challenges of a knowing organization (Choo, 2006).
While organizational culture is not immutable, attempts to change information discovery, creation, and use without consideration of existing cultural practices risks creating significant crisis points which can derail even the most necessary of change goals (Hayes, 2018). A solid understanding of an organization’s cultural knowledge and organizational culture helps shape knowledge management efforts that best fit existing practice and mitigates the consequences of poor fit.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Tertiary Contradiction: Conflicts that unfold as a CHAT modeled activity changes over time (e.g., changes in subjects, rules, tools/technologies over time may force a change in the overall execution of the activity).
Quaternary Contradiction: Conflicts that arise when one activity model clashes with another that share similar intended outcomes (e.g., two groups independently working towards a goal that only one group can attain).
Secondary Contradiction: Conflicts that may arise between various nodes of the CHAT model (e.g., a subject’s intended activity raising concern of community members).
Tools/Technologies: Part of the core activity in CHAT, tools/technologies are methods engaged by subjects to realize their activity.
Community: An extension of the core activity in CHAT, community refers to external stakeholders who are not subjects of an activity but nevertheless have a say in its realization.
Norms/Rules: An extension of the core activity in CHAT, norms/rules represent both formal laws and informal customs at play as subjects consider their activity.
Primary Contradiction: Conflicts that may arise within one node of the CHAT model (e.g., inconsistencies among formal rules and unwritten norms/values that may require reconciliation).
Object/Outcome: Part of the core activity in CHAT, the object is the end result from subjects engaging tools/technologies to complete an activity; the outcome is the intended object, which may differ.
Subject: Part of the core activity in CHAT, the subject is an individual or group attempting to achieve a given activity.