Overcoming Barriers of Knowledge Sharing through Communities of Practice: A Case Study of Steel Company

Knowledge management is systematic management of vital knowledge resources and its associated processes of creating, gathering, organizing, diffusion, use and exploitation. A key challenge emerging for such organizations is how to encourage knowledge sharing within organization because knowledge is the organization’s intellectual capital, of increasing importance in promoting competitive advantages. Isolated initiatives for promoting knowledge sharing and team collaboration, without taking consideration of the knowledge sharing limitations and constraints can defeat further development of KM culture. This article investigates knowledge sharing bottlenecks and proposes the use of community of practice as an effective instrument for knowledge sharing. The article demonstrates the opportunity for overcoming barriers of knowledge sharing through the application of communities of practice. The article introduces a steel company case as the best practice of communities of practice. Then, the paper empirically analyzes the case study to provide evidence for the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.