Communities of Practice: An Influencing Factor for Effective Knowledge Transfer in Organizations

For managing their intellectual capital and also to utilize the ‘knowledge’ more efficiently, a number of organizations have introduced Knowledge Management (KM) systems. Though explicit knowledge capture and transfer was quite possible, tacit knowledge was still a challenge for organization experts to capture and transfer. The concept of Communities of Practice (CoP) in KM is increasingly becoming popular to enhance social interactions. CoP refers to informal groups of people bound together by a common purpose. In these communities, members are provided opportunity to share their best practices, which are commonly implicit in nature. However, knowledge sharing in CoP has not been fully researched yet. The purpose of this paper is to review the relationship between KM and CoP and examine how it can influence the knowledge-sharing process in organizations. This study proposes a critical reading of the studies available on the topic, with the purpose to identify the main elements and methods influencing the transfer of knowledge. It reviews the emerging concept of ‘CoP’ as a knowledge transfer method for sharing knowledge which is commonly implicit in nature. This paper presents that the concept of CoP can foster joint learning that involves tacit and codified knowledge. Members of a CoP share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. The existence of common knowledge and a shared system of values makes sharing tacit knowledge easier in CoP, as group members have insights into the implicit assumptions and values embedded in each other’s knowledge. An empirical work in managing CoP and in identifying the knowledge-sharing methods represents an interesting challenge for further research in the area.