Professional Services Firms promote knowledge sharing cultures to maintain consistency in the internal flow of organizational knowledge. Building a knowledge sharing culture takes tough time. Enterprises make lot of efforts to share knowledge in effective way by adjusting the influencing factors like changing the organisational structure and culture, motivation and evaluation mechanism etc. Any knowledge management strategy designed to improve business performance must address the component “organizational culture” that includes behaviours, norms and practices. Organisation needs to promote knowledge sharing by adopting various methods for motivating employees, so they successfully diffuse their knowledge.The purpose of this case study was to explore the different issues faced by global Professional Services Firms while promoting knowledge sharing culture at their local branch. It was interesting to figure out that how a global „Professional Services Firm‟ promotes knowledge sharing culture at their local branch. Aim was also to highlight how these firms can change employee‟s „knowledge-hoarding behaviours‟ to „knowledge-sharing behaviours’ with the help of incentives and rewards.A qualitative exploratory case study was conducted by adopting social constructivist worldview. The research settings for our research were the Ernst & Young (Växjö) branch. Data was collected through observations and interviews. To assist the data collection phase, we have taken permission to observe their daily practises of knowledge sharing twice in a month.The main findings conclude that „Working as a unit‟ and „spirit of helping everyone‟ is a key to promote knowledge sharing culture at global Professional Services Firm‟s local branches. „Low power distances‟ as in „Nordic culture‟ provides solid platform for global Professional Services Firms to promote knowledge sharing culture. This is actually a good way of promoting knowledge sharing culture by decreasing level gap. Findings show that by decreasing level gaps and helping juniors, knowledge can become organisational rather than individual. Our investigation indicates that this local branch hasn‟t adopted any incentive programmes specifically for knowledge sharing. They are managing knowledge sharing with Nordic or Swedish way of working. Non-monetary incentives can be useful to motivate and reinforce specific behaviours of individuals. It can also helpful to boost up cooperative behaviours while working in teams. Professional Services Firms can win the battle of developing a true knowledge sharing culture by working as a unit, reducing power distances and motivating employees.

In the last few years accountancy firms have started to use outsourcing due to market pressure to be competitive. The industry is highly regulated, and outsourcing poses constraints including confidentiality of information, regulatory restriction and ethical implications. The legal and ethical responsibility of any work outsourced remains with the accounting firm that has purchased the outsourcing service, and not with the outsourcer. Since the aim of outsourcing is to make the accounting firm more efficient, it needs to be sure that the benefits of outsourcing will exceeds the costs and risks of the process. As a knowledge-based industry, this gives the sharing of knowledge a central role in outsourcing. Outsourcing in accounting creates a relationship not only between two organisations, but more importantly among those organisations' workers. The main asset of an accounting firm is its staff and their specialist knowledge. Most outsourcing studies focus on the relationship between organisations, with little emphasis on the relationship between workers. A particular quality of accounting is that workers are the owners of their own knowledge, and firms employ these workers without having a definitive right to the sharing of their knowledge. An efficient working environment stems from the workers' ability to share their knowledge (their assets) within the organisation and in an outsourcing process. The objective of this research is to understand the blocks to knowledge-sharing in a medium-sized accounting firm from an individual unit of analysis with focus on its outsourcing operations. This study examines the following research questions: What is the influence of trust and power on knowledge-sharing from the individual perspective? How does accounting outsourcing create a shift in the unit of analysis, and how does it differ from other types of outsourcing? From the perspective of the individuals involved, what are the blocks to knowledge-sharing within the firm and within its outsourcing operations? To be able to study worker relationships and behaviour in detail, data for analysis was gathered using the participant observation method. The study finds that trust and power are important elements that can influence the sharing of knowledge among individuals. The main types of trust that influence knowledge-sharing, particularly in head office, are found to be benevolence and competence trust, while one of the main factors to influence trust within the outsourcing context is communication. Lack of communication creates fear among in-house staff and thus makes outsourcing contractors less trustworthy. Power is mainly driven by specificity of knowledge and individualism; these two factors promote the use of knowledge as a power tool. Trust and power are blocks to knowledge-sharing in the organisation's in-house activities, but are less influential in blocking knowledge in outsourcing, where the two main blockages are: (i) Physical distance and lack of suitable technological platform to share knowledge, and (ii) Gap in knowledge awareness between the accounting firm and the outsourcing provider. Accounting outsourcing is shown to be different from other types because it is the outsourcing of a core competence (known as third generation outsourcing), and also of knowledge-based work. The accounting firm uses outsourcing within its legal and ethical limits, reducing costs indirectly, because it has to negotiate the profession's constraints. In this context there are two types of outsourcing, namely internal and external outsourcing. This research applies participant observation to an original context and shows the importance of using such a method in future management studies.

Knowledge sharing is of great importance for many of the companies today (Spender and Grant, 1996) and been a hot topic amongst researchers in the field of business and organization science (Alvesson and Karreman, 2001). Previous researches have been focusing on; the construction of good knowledge management systems, the general challenges of knowledge sharing including from a psychology perspective, increasing motivation to share knowledge etc. (Hahn and Subramani, 2000; Hung et. al, 2011). However, less research has been done on knowledge sharing between the organization and an acquired company specialized in a different area of knowledge (Gammelgaard et. al., 2004).  Hence, the objective of this thesis is to study the arising knowledge sharing challenges during an acquisition and whether reward system can be utilized to motivate the employees to overcome these challenges by encouraging them to engage in knowledge sharing activities.   In order to conduct this study, a case of a mid-sized consultant company with approximately 600 employees acquiring another smaller consultant company in a different field of knowledge with approximately 200 employees was used. Interviews were conducted with chosen people from both companies, amongst them were both CEOs and consultants. From the findings made from the interviews, the following conclusions were drawn. The identified challenges, which arose during the acquisition, were not dividing the company, communication, motivation and the use of terminology. In addition, although reward systems would increase employees’ motivation to engage in knowledge sharing activities, in the short-term, it should be avoided since it does not influence the long-term motivation. Intrinsic motivation was found to have the best long-term effect when coupled with the culture of the organization.

Offshore software development (OSD) is a leading business sector in the present ‘glocal’ IT marketplace, and vendors in different countries are opening software development centres worldwide to take advantage of the new business opportunities. However, software development is both a technical and a social process as various software modules need to be integrated, which requires ongoing interaction between the stakeholders. The software modules rely upon local knowledge regarding customer wants, project specific features, chosen design methodologies by development team members and synchronisation of activities to confirm the next design iteration. This study focuses on knowledge sharing processes involving the interplay between acquiring local knowledge and applying the knowledge acquired into the design of the client-specific software builds. New knowledge is created as new processes are applied and new outcomes realised, resulting in re-definition of software development practices. Building on existing theories with empirical case study evidence, this research reveals the socio-technical influences on knowledge management in the OSD process. Ideographic research methods have been applied to bring sensitivity in the everyday organisational activities for knowledge sharing across diverse social and cultural groups within two country contexts (New Zealand and India). Empirical data from ten case studies is used to inductively develop a conceptual framework, which has been applied to make within case and cross case comparisons across three levels of analysis (micro, meso and macro) for knowledge sharing. The micro level analysis explores individual key success drivers (behaviours and methodologies), the meso level explores organisational level practices (work processes and structures) and the macro level gives a holistic evaluation across two country contexts. Country contexts reveal that New Zealand vendors share closer cultural proximity with their clients, are engaged in client facing skills and have further outsourced software development tasks to other low cost countries. The Indian vendors are involved in software construction, prefer technical specialist skills and have defined more discipline in their software development processes. The thesis offers new insights on how vendors’ shape their software development styles based upon their beliefs and understanding of the offshore market and is especially relevant to both vendors and clients who intend venturing into the offshore market.

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As more and more convenience technology brings to human’s life by breaking through the obstacles of geography and psychology, e-health is being accepted by increasing number of people. It shows great potential to decrease the gap between the needs and satisfaction. However, the potential of e-health is far from being noticed. Knowledge shows inevitable advantages in different domains and of course the same in the health care industry. There are many different aspects that can be investigated and improved to reach the purpose, but in this dissertation, we aims to explore how to achieve a better knowledge transfer and sharing among e-health service-providers in order to create high-quality services that will be delivered to the patients. In general, U-CARE community is the one case that studied in this dissertation to explore how to identify knowledge transfer & sharing practices and what techniques can be used to improve it in the context of e-health. A theoretical framework from Etienne Wenger is applied here to help the author understand community well. Further analysis and discussion are based both on existing theories derived from literature review and empirical data obtained in interviews. The main contribution from the author and conclusion in this dissertation are summarized in a format of framework concerning useful techniques and methods (shown in Figure 9), which involves knowledge transfer and sharing practices related to formal/informal meetings, face-to-face communication, coordinator, online platform, IT tools, change management, documentation management, tracking of requirements & decisions, library of FAQ and personalization. The transferred and shared knowledge investigated in this dissertation is “back-office” data, not directly related to patient data, so the protection of patient personal privacy is not a consideration in this dissertation.

Abstract People are racing with time in the era of knowledge economics. Those who are faster will be the winners. Those who are with original ideas will catch more chances to meet the customer¡¦s needs. Business speed and originality pop out of the performance of R&D. The performance of R&D depends on its member¡¦s personal knowledge and the knowledge prevailing in the origination. The pile of knowledge quantity and speed bases on how fast knowledge is shared. The factors of knowledge sharing situation are related to the characters of the organization and the sharing culture of its departments. This study will discuss the factors of the knowledge sharing situation. Furthermore, what are the performances of R&D? And what is the relationship between the character of the organization and knowledge sharing situation? And will the character of the organization and the R&D¡¦s knowledge sharing affect the performance of R&D? The conclusions of this study are proposed as followings: 1. Factors of the relationship between the character of the organization and knowledge sharing situation: 2. Factors of the relationship between knowledge sharing situation and the performance of the R&D: 3. The impact of the interaction with the organization character and the knowledge sharing situation on the performance of the R&D. Keywords: knowledge sharing R&D performance

This study developed a conceptual model for exploring the correlation between relational dimension of social capital and relation models in hope to reveal to what extent each elements in relational dimension of social capital influences the combination of relation models of knowledge sharing. Further we investigated the impact of each relation model on the effectiveness of knowledge sharing and attempt to present an efficient mechanism based on the combination of the four relation models. We adopted the survey method and focus on the members in IS project team to collect research data. Canonical correlation analysis was employed to examine the correlation between the two constructs, the relational dimension of social capital and the relation models of knowledge sharing, and two significant canonical functions with powerful explanation were derived. The first canonical function with major explanatory power showed that all the elements in the relational dimension of social capital are highly related with the models, CS, EM and MP, in the construct of relation models. The second canonical function, in which obligation is highly related with MP and AR, was derived with inferior explanatory power to the first one. Stepwise regression analysis was conducted to investigate the relationship between each relation model and the effectiveness of knowledge sharing. CS, among the four relation models, was found to have the highest positive significance with the effectiveness, followed by EM and MP sequentially, while AR was found no significant relation with the effectiveness of knowledge in our observations. With the results of this study, we hope to present an efficient mechanism for practitioners to promote knowledge management by enhancing corresponding social capital in relational dimension and offer comprehensive perspectives for researchers to achieve a better insight of the dynamics of knowledge sharing.

Knowledge has been considered as the important resource to the competitive advantage of an organization. Knowledge sharing is critical because intellectual assets, unlike physical assets, increase in value with use. Knowledge and intellect grow exponentially when shared. However, Professionals¡¦ reluctance to exchange knowledge inhibits sharing. Knowledge always could not be allocated well. Therefore, this paper is based on an empirical investigation of knowledge-sharing from information system (IS) professionals. Through a social perspective, it explores the important affecting factors on Knowledge-sharing behavior. The main contribution of this study is to adopt a well-established social theory, i.e., Social Exchange Theory (Blau, 1964¡FThibaut &Kelley, 1959¡FHomans, 1958) to construct a knowledge-sharing research model, which provides some practical and academic suggestions for the future.

Today it has become standard for organizations to rely on self-serving teams to make decisions since they are believed to provide access to bigger pools of information and knowledge than individual managers. However, while a lot of research has been focusing on how to improve information and knowledge sharing in teams to better promote the making of deliverables, not much has been said about how self-serving teams actually communicate information and knowledge. In this thesis a qualitative study was conducted with seven members of a software-provisioning team to, with particular focus on using IT when communicating, investigate how information and knowledge is communicated within and across team boundaries. Findings in this thesis suggest that there is a tension between information and knowledge sharing in teams. While the formalization of technological channels might facilitate effective information sharing in teams, it could have negative effects on knowledge sharing.