Collaborative Processes and Knowledge Creation in Communities‐of‐Practice

Abstract

This paper challenges the view of employees’ reluctance to share what they know, thus, attributing the ‘stickiness’ of knowledge to motivational factors. The study investigated informal mechanisms for knowledge sharing, taking a community‐of‐practice (CoP) perspective as a point of departure. A large‐sized organisation in the utilities sector provided the context of the research. Existing CoP theory is advanced by surfacing the motivations for participation in CoPs, by eliciting the contributions informal, self‐organising communities achieve in a commercial context and by documenting the process by which informal community activities become absorbed into the formal organisation.