Keeping knowledge within an organisation : A study of distributed knowledge management

Abstract: Knowledge management is considered as a way of gaining competitive advantage for organisations and research has for quite some time been addressing its challenges. The purpose of this study is to create deeper insights and understanding of how a multinational organisation handles knowledge management while working in a distributed manner. Our research question is thereby: How are knowledge management and sharing practices handled by distributed work arrangements at a multinational organisation? In this qualitative case study interviews and observations were performed. Our findings show that relationships between members, tasks and tools exist in our studied organisation and are handled in different ways on different levels. Furthermore another relationship was found, culture, which affected knowledge management. This thesis contributes to knowledge management research by adding an extra dimension to an existing framework. We also add deeper insights and understanding of how distributed work arrangements are handled within knowledge management.