Knowledge Sharing in a Digital, Remote, and Disrupted World: The Role of Trust

Introduction

Organizations implement knowledge management activities to drive organizational efficiency, innovation, and performance (Davenport & Prusak, 1998). For these activities to be successful, it will require that individuals and teams are able to share knowledge. Activities such as creating and sharing knowledge and using others' knowledge will require communication, cooperation, and collaboration. Without a healthy dose of trust, such interdependent tasks are doomed to fail. An internal lack of trust within an organization can also bleed externally and damage relationships with customers, stakeholders, and the public, resulting in disastrous results for an organization (Hurley, 2019; Wzorek, 2021). One of the critical ways organizations can build trust with employees is to share knowledge regularly (Zak, 2007). Trust and knowledge sharing have a symbiotic relationship for organizational performance, and both are heavily influenced by the organization’s culture (Conley & Zheng, 2009; Ling, 2011). Organizations that have built a high-trust culture see positive results such as greater productivity, collaboration, innovation, and higher employee retention (Zak, 2007; De Cremer, 2020). Leadership plays an influential role in building trust within teams and reinforcing positive knowledge-sharing behaviors; furthermore, teams that share knowledge benefit from better team performance (Lee et al., 2010). To remain successful in a period of significant disruption, organizations will need to strengthen both their trust-building and knowledge-sharing capabilities.

As organizations worldwide adapt to new ways of working brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, many will need to find new ways to share knowledge as workers move from in-office to remote and distributed. While many organizations were using information communication technology in-office, the move to a completely remote workforce accelerated many organizations' digital transformations (Drenik, 2020; Lund et al., 2020) and changed the way workers were used to working with each other. Even though there was a great need to implement new methods of collaboration and connection, employees still struggled to adopt new technologies (Drenik, 2020). While there have been struggles, organizations are also seeing benefits to this new way of working, and many are believing that it is the way of the future (Sawatzky & Macrae, 2020; Lund et al., 2020, Choudhury & Salomon, 2020). Organizations are evaluating hybrid models where workers can spend a certain percent of the time at home or in the office alongside a more permanent remote model (Sawatzky & Macrae, 2020; Lund et al., 2020). This shift in how a considerable portion of the workforce engages in their work will impact organizational culture and interpersonal trust between employees.