Teams or Communities? Organizational Structures for Knowledge Management

Abstract

Organizations are looking for new organizational structures in order to improve their knowledge management. Knowledge management is a general umbrella concept that covers many different processes, but here we limit ourselves to three specific knowledge management processes: knowledge creation, knowledge legitimization, and knowledge sharing. With this purpose in mind, we examine and define two types of group structures: teams and communities; and we elaborate propositions on their advantages and disadvantages for creating, legitimizing, and sharing knowledge in organizations.

Keywords: Teams, communities, organizational structure, knowledge management, knowledge creation, knowledge legitimization, knowledge sharing