While the motivation of employees has been recognized as a major factor for successful implementation of knowledge management systems, most measures to influence motivation have concentrated on incentives, both in terms of monetary rewards and other extrinsically motivation schemes which are designed as top-down instruments. Research has shown that these can work under certain circumstances, but usually (particularly in genuine knowledge worker environments) are problematic, often short-term in their effects and sometimes even counter-productive. Web 2.0 has shown that under certain circumstances people are highly motivated to contribute and to share knowledge, a phenomenon which has stimulated further investigation into the subject like experiments on knowledge sharing behaviour from a psychological perspective.

Little investigation has taken place for workplace settings where informal learning and the integration of learning and working are dominating elements: which barriers do we have to take into account there? How should supporting tools be designed for a workplace context?

As motivation is a wide and open field, the ethnographic studies have shown that it is more valuable to describe and address motivational barriers, rather than trying to decompose determinants of motivation as such. Those determinants rarely occur in isolation; real-world phenomena are complex mixtures so that the decomposition does not yield much added value. Barriers, however, and their systematizations allow for identification of different fields of intervention.

Within the MATURE project, a motivational model has been developed that identifies three different dimensions

Bibliography

2009