Communities of Practice Purposefully Designed for Improving Business Performance

What is it about?

This paper aims to explore management approaches of purposefully creating and sustaining strategically designed CoPs as a tool to deliver tangible organizational performance. This research identifies management approaches to intentionally creating CoPs by conducting a comprehensive exploratory case study research based on in-depth interviews with executives, middle managers and employees in three case studies conducted within Thailand’s manufacturing sector. One of the cases included in this study discontinued its corporate KM efforts during the last economic crisis, in 2009, and such efforts have yet to be reinstated. The three case studies demonstrate how these companies purposefully designed and established CoPs to target tangible organizational objectives and how they refocused the agenda of their CoPs to support productivity improvements, in addition to other more traditional knowledge management goals. This study also identifies the structures of a CoP created with the intention to achieve tangible organizational performance goals. Organizations that create CoPs with the purpose of improving tangible organizational performance dimensions can gain insights from our findings how to design and manage such CoPs. This paper is one of the first to empirically explore and describe approaches to creating and managing CoPs in order to improve explicit business performance goals.

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