In my last two KM blogs, I’ve analyzed the relationships between KM and conflict, in the context of seeing problems, making knowledge, and integrating knowledge. This post will extend the analysis to the top-tier of the Three-tier model, Knowledge Management activity itself.
I distinguish three major top-tier categories of KM activities. These are activities: I) directed at enhancing knowledge processing related to business processes and outcomes; II) performing knowledge processing creating and integrating knowledge about how to enhance knowledge processing related to business processing; and III) managing non-knowledge processing top-tier related KM activities themselves. I’ve already discussed the relationship of KM and Conflict in I) above in the first and second blogs in this series. Also, the factors discussed in that analysis also apply to II) just above. So that leaves discussing the relationship of KM to conflict in the sphere of category III activities. These are: symbolic representation; building external relationships with others practicing KM; and leadership.
Symbolic representation activities are those that manipulate symbols of KM authority to reinforce that authority. In many organizations, KM may be performed entirely in a stealth manner and there may be no obvious symbols of KM authority to manipulate. In organizations that have formal KM functions including job descriptions specifying KM duties, those performing KM activities will talk about their organizational role and otherwise publicize it and promote it throughout their organizations. This kind of activity rarely creates conflict by itself, as long as claims to authority, don’t go much beyond what’s specified in job descriptions. If KM personnel claim greater authority than this, however, this is likely to be a source of conflict within the KM function. The remedy for this kind of conflict is fairly straightforward however. It is just modesty and humility about one’s job description and also taking care not to infringe on the responsibilities of other managers in taking action.
Building external relationships with others in KM, is also likely to be an area where there is little conflict among top-tier KM practitioners in the same organizations. The most obvious source of conflict here, is in perceived unfair allocation of resources for building relationships among KM personnel. The remedy for this is transparency and equity in top-tier resource allocation aimed at cultivating external relationships.
The most important sub-category of III is “leadership” since it is a catch-all covering any number of activities that are aspects of leadership. For example, recruiting, hiring, training, motivating, evaluating activities and staff, persuading others of the utility of KM, consensus-building, persuading, compelling, incenting, informing, obligating, delegating, meeting, using memoranda, and many others we can think of. Clearly, any of these leadership activities, whether in KM or other spheres of activity, are subject to conflict transactions.
There is nothing special about conflict exchanges in leadership activities in the KM sphere compared to such exchanges in other spheres of management activity. Among KM personnel, conflict patterns can be characterized by hierarchical repression, hierarchical coercive mobilization, isolative/frozen patterns of interaction, open patterns of interaction involving transparency, trust, relative equality, and a good deal of bargaining and compromise. If KM is distributed and emphasizes KM networks and teams, and a highly civil culture of interaction, inevitable conflicts will be less likely to foster extreme mistrust and evolution of an open pattern of interaction to isolative frozen patterns. But if the KM top tier in an organization is hierarchical in the organization of its own leadership activities there will be a tendency to prevent and manage conflicts by developing a repressive or coercive mobilizational pattern of interaction. Both of these patterns will conflict with the need for KM-level knowledge processing to be open in character, since hierarchy in leadership interaction will be inconsistent with the need for democracy in KM problem solving and knowledge integration contexts. Thus, over time, repressive or coercive mobilizational KM leadership, though it may reduce or minimize the level of overt conflict, will undermine distributed knowledge processing at the KM level, which, in turn, will undermine the quality of KM-level knowledge processing.
So, this ends my take on the relationship of conflict to KM from the perspective of the three-tier model. Here are some conclusions: 1) conflict will enter problem seeking and related activities, knowledge processing activities, and also top-tier KM activities; 2) some conflict is an inevitable consequence of knowledge processing and KM activity because knowledge processing needs a variety of views which must then be evaluated, selected among, and finally integrated; 3) conflict is managed best if principles of openness are followed in each primary area of knowledge processing and in the KM top-tier, as well. I specified the principles to follow in this blog and in parts one and two.