A Social Capital Perspective on the Role of Human Resource Practices in Intra-Organisational Knowledge Sharing

Abstract

While a growing body of HRM research has underscored the primacy of people management issues within the broader KM agenda, little progress has been made in understanding the interrelationships between HR practices and intra-organisational knowledge sharing. The aim of this paper is to contribute theoretically to the debate on the emergent role of HR practices in intra-organisational knowledge sharing within knowledge-intensive firms. Viewing knowledge as a socially constructed phenomenon and the knowledge-intensive firm as a distributed knowledge system, the paper draws upon social capital theory and places to the forefront of the discussion the catalytic - although overlooked - role of organisational social structure (in the form of either social capital or social liability) in mediating the relationship between HRM and intra-organisational knowledge sharing. The paper suggests that employees' ability, motivation, and opportunity to share their human capital can be viewed as both the cause and the outcome of the cognitive, relational, and structural dimensions of social capital embedded in an organisation's - formal as well as informal - social architecture. The paper seeks to shed light into whether and how HR practices influence the creation and sustenance of social capital, and by extension, knowledge workers' decision to share what they know. Hence, understanding the dynamics of organisational social capital is considered as prerequisite for understanding the intervening role of HR practices in the knowledge sharing process. The paper places the HR dialogue on human capital in the social context of how knowledge can be managed and shared.