Communities of practice and organisational performance

Lesser E.L and Stork J ‘Communities of practice and organisational performance’ IBM Systems Journal vol 40 no. 4 2001 

This article discusses the application of communities of practice to improve organisational performance. Communities of practice have been gaining momentum in an organisational context and have evolved organically as email, electronic discussion groups and electronic chatrooms have provided opportunities for co-workers which are spread across vast geographic distances to share knowledge and network.

Lesser and Storck (2001) argue that communities of practice can provide the catalyst for development of social capital.  Social capital is the connections, relationships and often intangible networks which are inherently valuable to organisations and is an important element in building and maintaining knowledge within organisations. Lesser and Stork (2001, p833) suggest that the ‘social capital resident in communities of practice leads to behavioural changes that result in greater knowledge sharing which has a positive influence on business performance.’ Their conclusions were based on a study of seven local and global organisations in different stages of development where communities of practice were acknowledged to be creating value. The organisations studied were diverse and included multinationals, lending institutions, software companies, pharmaceutical companies and service organisations. The methodology included interviews with five to ten members of existing communities of practice within the organisations and recorded the perceptions of the value of communities of practice to both an individual and organisational level. They key implications from the study and the positive influences from a learning perspective include:

• maintaining and developing an organisations long term memory
• sharing knowledge outside traditional organisation hierarchical boundaries and within and across departments
• enriched learning opportunities for individual members of the community 
• higher motivation to apply what people have learned
• decreasing the learning curve for new employees
• responding more rapidly to customer needs through improved knowledge
• reducing rework and preventing “reinvention of the wheel”
• generation of new ideas for products and services

The most relevant outcome to learning is the opportunity to decrease the learning curve for new employees. One of the challenges for both business and new individuals to an organisation is the amount of knowledge which is required to learn the job at hand and become productive.  Communities of practice were seen as useful narratives that could be used to transfer tacit knowledge and bring an employee more quickly up to speed, particularly in dispersed or global organisations (Lesser and Storck 2001).