Examining Obstacles and Policies of the Knowledge-Sharing Process: A Case Study on the Civil Aviation Authority of Thailand

Abstract

noneNowadays knowledge-sharing has been adopted as an approach, or tool by organizations to facilitate their organizational knowledge creation through interactions among employees. Specially, the Civil Aviation Authority of Thailand (CAAT) implements their knowledge-sharing to encourage the exchange of knowledge among employees which in turns leads to organizational solid knowledge management system. This study, therefore, employs a single case study on knowledge-sharing process with multiple qualitative data collection methods to comprehensively gather insightful information to respond to the purposes of the study which are determined to examine the implementation of knowledge-sharing process, as well as obstacles, policies, and strategies to improve their knowledge-sharing effectiveness. To thoroughly understand the knowledge-sharing implementation process, the organizational knowledge creation theory was adopted to analyze how knowledge-sharing process at the CAAT. The findings of this study reveal that the three phases, including socialization, externalization, and combination, of organizational knowledge creation theory, can be adopted to understand the overall knowledge-sharing process implementation at the CAAT, while showing that the contributions of the knowledge sharers are keys to the success of knowledge-sharing implementation. Although obstacles caused by individuals and organizational factors are found, the organizational obstacles have more negative impacts on the knowledge-sharing. Intrinsically and extrinsically motivated policies and strategies are proposed to the organization to enhance the effectiveness of its organizational knowledge-sharing.Implications derived from the findings are also provided for the CAAT.