On Trust, Knowledge Sharing and Innovation

On Trust, Knowledge Sharing and Innovation

Isabel Martins (Australian College of Kuwait, Kuwait), Ana Martins (Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China) and Orlando Petiz Pereira (University of Minho, Campus de Gualtar, Portugal)
Copyright: © 2016 |Pages: 21
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-9562-7.ch064

Abstract

Organisations continuously innovate, create, and are competitive if they improve their performance through continuous intellectual capital development, a key resource for value creation and organisational performance driver. Apart from sustaining competitive advantage, intellectual capital is increasingly important due to its ability to increase shareholder value, especially in public organisations. Employee learning, talent development, and knowledge creation allow the organisation to generate innovative ideas due to the quickness of knowledge obsolescence. The organisation's dynamic capabilities create and re-ignite organisational competencies for business sustainability being co-ordinated by well-structured organisational strategic routines ensuring continuous value creation streams into the business. This chapter focuses on the relationship between notions of knowledge sharing and trust in organisations. Lack of trust can impact negatively organisational knowledge sharing, dependent on trust, openness, and communication. The research sample included graduates and postgraduate students from two universities in Portugal. The findings revealed different perceptions according to the age group.
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Introduction

Knowledge, from the input and output perspectives, is considered as the main competitive element in the knowledge-based economy. However, amidst this constant turbulent and changing environment, and the adaptation of the service economy to the knowledge economy, it seems imperative to control processes of the upstream and downstream economic activity arising from knowledge. In this way, there is a need for agility, sagacity and competence in order to implement and sustain processes of creation, storage and sharing having gone through the necessary assessment processes.

Therefore, this chapter aims to reflect upon the role of trust in the organisation’s strategy and will demonstrate that this value, known as trust, does indeed influence the performance of individuals in the organisation. This aim ensues the objectives of this research which are to determine the dynamic and competitive factors, i.e. the qualitative values, as well as to ascertain the impact of these qualitative values on the individual employees.

This research is divided into three parts. The first part includes a review of the literature in this field. The second part includes an analysis of the primary data obtained from the distribution of a questionnaire, which highlights perceptions of knowledge workers towards different variables in the realm of social capital. The third part of this research includes the main conclusions and a reflection of further research. A list of references is included at the end.

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