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Weekly UpdatesKnowledge Management (KM) is an emerging discipline with increasing popularity among large organizations. Greater importance than ever before is being placed by companies on their ability to share knowledge and the techniques and technologies that facilitate knowledge transfer (Murray and Peyrefitte, 2007). Knowledge Management allows organizations to share, capture, organize, and store internal company knowledge and intellectual capital. It is a way of finding, understanding, and using knowledge to create value (O'Dell, 2004). David C. Blair (2002) defined Knowledge Management as the active management of organizational support and expertise. One critical component of KM initiatives is creating methods to facilitate sharing of information. One of these methods supported in most enterprises with KM initiatives is the Communities of Practice (CP). Etienne Wenger (1991) defined communities of practice as a method to promote organizational learning through information sharing. The key characteristics that identify a group as a community of practice include: (1) a recognized domain of interest that the group members share an interest in and commit to, (2) relationships between group members that allow them to engage in joint activities, share information and help each other, and (3) the development of a shared practice that consists of shared resources, experiences, stories, tools, etc. (Wenger et al., 2002).
Communities of Practice appear to be an evolution of the team concept (Wenger et al., 2002). Although conventional teams have been highly successful over the years, Communities of Practice appear to provide additional benefits by being more responsive in dealing with the opportunities and challenges of today's rapidly changing environment, growing global competition, and the ever advancing information technology. Communities of Practice can provide organizations with a way to capture tacit or implicit knowledge by connecting people with similar interests, allowing them to capture information and make it accessible to the organization at large. Furthermore, as Droege and Hoobler (2003) point out, CPs are structures that can effectively prevent loss of tacit knowledge associated with employee turnover by providing the connections necessary for transfer and retention of knowledge.
Communities of Practice provide their members with a group of peers whom they can contact quickly and easily through technology, pose issues or specific problems, and obtain suggestions, in a relatively short time-frame. Therefore, Communities of Practice can help organizations transform from the traditional multidivisional or M-form organization into more competitive learning, or L-form, organization (James, 2002).
Although in recent years a growing body of literature has been emerging on communities of practice regarding their characteristics, the advantages they offer, the organizational motivation to use them, and ways of designing and putting them into practice, a cursory review of these works reveals that the vast majority of them rely on anecdotal case studies. This is understandable since the concept and related practices are still new and emerging. As such, systematic empirical studies on the subject are scant. This article is an attempt to narrow the above gap in the literature by presenting the results of an empirical study that explores the impact of select community characteristics on perceived overall community effectiveness, as reported by community members, and satisfaction of community members with their community experience. The results of the present study should provide new insight into the characteristics of successful CPs and, ultimately, contribute to the shaping of newer and more effective KM initiatives. Knowledge of predictors of community effectiveness can also assist in maintaining the overall health of active communities and providing a foundation on which community leaders can build to ensure a successful outcome for the organization and a rewarding participation for community members.
RESEARCH OBJECTIVES
This study will explore the effectiveness of Communities of Practice, using empirical data obtained from State Farm Insurance Companies. State Farm is the largest property and casualty insurance company in the Unites States and operates in a decentralized structure with 13 zone offices, more than 300 claim offices and contact centers, and 17,000 agents. Recognizing the need for better knowledge sharing and connectivity among these decentralized offices and processing centers, State Farm launched a KM initiative. The centerpiece of this initiative has been the formation of a network of communities of practice with a focus on inducing a greater quantity and quality of intentional collaboration and accelerating the transfer of best practices throughout the organization through the CP network. The CPs are self-directed and led by members of the group, rather than by a manager or representative from the corporate office. Also, the communities were built following a prescribed methodology that included definition of objectives through a community charter. Community members use document-sharing electronic folders for exchanging documents, and use conference calls, web-conferencing software, and email to conduct community activities. At the time this research was initiated, the company had plans to significantly expand its CP network by launching new additional communities. The company also has plans to develop a more focused approach to measuring the benefits of employee involvement in such communities. The company is building a bench-marking survey that will be used when a new community is first launched, and utilized again at later points along the life-cycle of the community. The organization intends to continue collecting such tracking data, with the ultimate goal of assessing community efficacy in contributing to the company's KM initiatives.
The key research question examined in this study was, "What community characteristics contribute to the effectiveness of Communities of Practice?" In the course of pursuing this broad question, we have also explored the answer to more specific questions, such as:
* Does participation in Communities of Practice have an impact on community members' job performance?
* Does the strength of community leadership play a role in determining the quality of experience employees report?
* Is participation in Communities of Practice, in general, a satisfactory experience?
* Does the affective commitment of community members to its viability and success play a part in determining its effectiveness?
The term "Community of Practice" was coined only within the last decade or so (Wenger, 1991), although the actual application of the concept in practice is not new. Communities of Practice are a natural context for organizational learning. As such, a growing number of organizations in a wide variety of industries are beginning to focus on CPs as an important tool for improving job-related knowledge and learning. Further, they can play an important part in bridging organizational learning with organizational strategy and, thus, could potentially become the paramount structural form of the 21st Century (Snyder, 1997).
Despite the growing popularity of CPs, empirical research on the effectiveness of CPs, has been very limited. Therefore, this study is intended to shed some light on the subject by attempting to identify predictors of CP effectiveness. The study focuses on such variables as level of trust among community members, perception of interpersonal connectedness to coworkers, level of member commitment to the success of the community, community leadership strength, perceived impact on one's job performance, perceived overall community effectiveness, and level of satisfaction with the community experience. It is hoped that the results of this study will add to the understanding of the factors that need to be considered in the design and implementation of communities of practice in order to enhance learning, promote sharing of best practices, and ultimately enable companies to place a more focused effort in integrating KM practices into their cultures.
LITERATURE REVIEW AND RESEARCH MODEL
Knowledge Management has been recognized as a specific discipline since the mid-90s. The discipline includes a number of models or methodologies, including Communities of Practice, Action in Review, Peer Assist, and Tacit Knowledge Discovery. There are also a number of technologies associated with Knowledge Management, including collaborative software, blogs, instant messaging, expertise location, and advanced search and cataloguing software.
One of the most developed and widely-practiced models across organizations is the Community of Practice (Brown and Duguid, 2000). This is particularly true in such process-in-tensive operations as manufacturing, health care, and research. Communities of Practice were first discussed in the literature by Etienne Wenger (Wenger, 1991). One of the first documented applications of such collaboration groups involved Xerox's machine repair representative (Brown and Duguid, 2000). While this study demonstrated how working in knowledge-sharing groups can move organizations from process re-engineering to knowledge management, Anand, Gardner and Morris (2007) in a more recent study of consulting firms documented the efficacy of Communities of Practice as effective knowledge-based structures capable of producing innovations. Additionally, Kranendonk and Kersten (2007), in their review of the CP adoption by the government of the Netherlands, concluded that CPs are very powerful instruments that can assist in solving complex problems not easily tackled by individuals.
McDermott (1999) suggests that there are three basic considerations an organization should take when designing a CP. The organization should determine: (1) the kinds of knowledge that will be shared in the group--i.e., explicit or tactic knowledge, (2) the group's sense of identity, and (3) the extent to which the knowledge shared is integrated into actual work. Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (2002) assert that most Communities of Practice are formed on a voluntary, informal basis and should indeed be formed in this manner in order for them to succeed. On the other hand, Perry and Zender (2004), in their study of the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), showed that Communities of Practice can be formed intentionally and still be successful. The association (AHIMA) needed a new, efficient and effective way to help their members share and manage knowledge and, thus, experimented with Communities of Practice. The concept was well received and took off quickly. After five years, the AHIMA (with approximately 48,000 members) had successfully formed and maintained 200 communities.
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