Overcoming Barriers to Knowledge Maturing: Motivational and Cultural Aspects

While it is generally acknowledged that motivational, social, and cultural aspects are crucial for changing workplace practice, it turns out to be difficult to include this aspect into design processes. MATURE has therefore (i) developed an analysis model that allows for systematic addressing of motivational aspects and (ii) conducted empirical studies on relevant barriers.

Based on an extension of the model for workplace behaviour by  (Comelli and von Rosenstiel, 2003), the influencing factors on the engagement in a concrete knowledge maturing activity can be decomposed into three main aspects:

• Individual. This aspect refers to factors that originate directly in the personality and personal characteristics of the individual. Two basic families of factors can be identified:
  • Capability describes factors that affect whether an individual can engage in knowledge maturing activities. This comprises cognitive abilities to understand the issues at hand, and meta competencies, e.g., to cooperate, or to explain to others.
  • Interests, values and needs affect whether an individual wants to engage in knowledge maturing activities. These interests can be rational goals, e.g., for one’s own career, but also comprise personal values, e.g., personal quality standards, and needs, e.g., for appreciation.
• The work context consists of organisational prerequisites for engagement in knowledge maturing activities:
• Organisational factors affect whether the individual is allowed to or is even supposed to engage in concrete maturing activities, i.e., it comprises authorization, legitimation, commitment, rewarding, among others.
• Enabling factors refer to the technical and non-technical facilities offered or tolerated by the organisation to engage in knowledge maturing activities. This comprises technical systems like document and knowledge management systems, email, instant messaging, but also coffee machines and water coolers as possibilities for social interaction. Frequently, not only the facilities as such, but also the implicit and explicit regulations for their usage form an important part.
• Cooperative factors refer to cooperation as such and its inherent conflicts of interest from a more rational point of view. As cooperation in a single activity is frequently asymmetric, mismatches of interest occur so that win-win situations do not form.
• Affective factors refer to the emotional side of social relationships and how the involved individual views the quality of these relationships. This includes factors like trust, or “personal chemistry”.
• The interpersonal context is equally important as most knowledge maturing activities involve interpersonal communication and cooperation.

Based on an extension of the model for workplace behaviour by (Comelli and von Rosenstiel, 2003), the influencing factors on the engagement in a concrete knowledge maturing activity can be decomposed into three main aspects:

• Individual. This aspect refers to factors that originate directly in the personality and personal characteristics of the individual. Two basic families of factors can be identified:
  • Capability describes factors that affect whether an individual can engage in knowledge maturing activities. This comprises cognitive abilities to understand the issues at hand, and meta competencies, e.g., to cooperate, or to explain to others.
  • Interests, values and needs affect whether an individual wants to engage in knowledge maturing activities. These interests can be rational goals, e.g., for one’s own career, but also comprise personal values, e.g., personal quality standards, and needs, e.g., for appreciation.
• The work context consists of organisational prerequisites for engagement in knowledge maturing activities:
  • Organisational factors affect whether the individual is allowed to or is even supposed to engage in concrete maturing activities, i.e., it comprises authorization, legitimation, commitment, rewarding, among others.
  • Enabling factors refer to the technical and non-technical facilities offered or tolerated by the organisation to engage in knowledge maturing activities. This comprises technical systems like document and knowledge management systems, email, instant messaging, but also coffee machines and water coolers as possibilities for social interaction. Frequently, not only the facilities as such, but also the implicit and explicit regulations for their usage form an important part.
• Cooperative factors refer to cooperation as such and its inherent conflicts of interest from a more rational point of view. As cooperation in a single activity is frequently asymmetric, mismatches of interest occur so that win-win situations do not form.
  • Affective factors refer to the emotional side of social relationships and how the involved individual views the quality of these relationships. This includes factors like trust, or “personal chemistry”.
  • The interpersonal context is equally important as most knowledge maturing activities involve interpersonal communication and cooperation.

These factors cannot be clearly separated and also have at least long-term interdependencies:

• Capabilities of the individual can be improved by organisational measures (giving more responsibilities). This in turn can result in a shift of interest as self-esteem has risen. A change in interest changes the fundamentals of cooperation.
• The organisation can also introduce technologies that promote transparency and participation. This can conflict with or transform the corporate culture which in turn influences the foundations of cooperation, e.g., changes the value of competition vs. cooperation.

Designing for Motivation

The model allows for a systematic approach to motivational barriers and separates different aspects. But how to move on from here towards a systematic integration into the design process? One important lesson of the MATURE project was that it was highly beneficial to have software developers as (a part of) the ethnographers. While the original purpose of the ethnographic studies has been in the first run primarily to inform the concept development, it has turned out that taking part in those studies, i.e., immersing into a team of people at their workplaces, creates a very deep understanding of problems, needs, barriers etc. (in short: the target users’ reality). This has created a fundamentally different level of shared understanding between technical developers and application partners.

Based on those experiences, we propose the following methodology, which is evaluated as part of current project activities:

• Immersion of technical developers in the workplace reality as part of rapid ethnographically informed studies with a focus on motivational aspects and guided by the model as presented in the previous section
• Derivation of personas, i.e. a precise description of a user’s characteristics and what he/she wants to accomplish [Cooper 99] as a real world person with an explicit consideration of the three aspects of the model (i.e., what is the individual/interpersonal/organizational context of the persona that influences her motivational structure)
• Development of use case descriptions for those personas in direct interaction of developments and users (or their representatives), with an explicit section on interventions targeted to motivational aspects or context conditions
• Deriving functional and non-functional requirements from those descriptions
• Formative evaluation of early prototypes with end users in which – if possible – different motivational measures are compared to each other in order select the most effective one.

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