Team-based reconstruction for expanding organisational ability
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#2003 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved. 0160-5682/03 $15.00 www.palgrave-journals.com/jors
Team-based reconstruction for expanding organisational ability M Lind* and U Seigerroth Jo¨nko¨ping International Business School, University College of Bora˚s, Bora˚s, Sweden Organisations can be interpreted as a collection of actors who produce value for clients. In order for organisations to stay competitive there is a need for organisations to continuously develop their ability. An organisation’s ability is determined by its ability to effectively apply existing knowledge to create new knowledge and to take action that forms the basis for achieving competitive advantage from knowledge-based assets. One means for developing the organisational ability is to establish a mutually accepted understanding of the context in which the actors are acting. One important part of the organisation’s knowledge creation processes is to facilitate the sharing of personal knowledge. A condition for developing the organisational ability is to expand the amount of shared knowledge to an appropriate level. One type of knowledge that needs to be shared among different actors within the organisation is the knowledge about how and in which order actions are performed (contextual knowledge) in order to satisfy client needs. In this paper an approach for team-based reconstruction, used for moving from personal to shared contextual knowledge, is presented. The approach bears on the foundation of theories about knowledge management for understanding the process of externalisation and theories about language action for understanding organisations. Experiences from three case studies are presented. Team-based reconstruction can be used for (1) moving from personal knowledge to shared contextual knowledge in an efficient way, (2) arriving at a foundation for efficient organisational coordination, (3) arriving at a base for development work, and (4) organisational learning. Journal of the Operational Research Society (2003) 54, 119–129. doi:10.1057=palgrave.jors.2601474 Keywords: shared knowledge; team-based; reconstruction; knowledge management; modelling
Introduction An organisation can be understood as a group of actors who have a mission to create value for its clients. The organisation can then be viewed as ‘ . . . some actor(s)—based on assignments from some actors—makes something in favour of some actor(s), and sometimes against some actor(s), and this action is based on some values, rules, knowledge and competence’.1 All organisations are driven by some kind of rationality, where the management literature of the late 1990s2,3 has emphasised the need for an efficient value production to satisfy customer needs. One important means to reach such efficiency is the organisation’s ability to coordinate different organisational actions4,5 performed by different actors. This means that there are several actors involved in the organisation’s value production. Each action performed by its actor is an important link in the value chain.
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