You want your employees and team mates to share what they know, right? Knowledge sharing can only strengthen the work you’re doing together.
Unfortunately, knowledge sharing is much less common than you’d expect. In fact, two robust HRB studies of workers in Australia and China found that people really need to be motivated to share at all.
And motivation works best when it’s self-driven: the desire to share what one knows or make conversation about areas of expertise.
In fact, “Pressuring people to share knowledge rather than making them see the value of it doesn’t work very well,” says HBR.
If knowledge sharing is motivated by fear of reprisal or of losing competitive advantage, colleagues aren’t as open to sharing fully. In fact, they’re apt to become knowledge hoarders.
One important trend to note is that people tend to share more in “cognitively complex” roles in which people need to process information in abundance and solve complex problems.
The good news: focusing on the cognitively demanding aspects of any role will make team members more likely to share.
https://hbr.org/2019/07/why-employees-dont-share-knowledge-with-each-other
