Fostering Knowledge Sharing to Encourage R&D Team Learning

Nowadays, firms operating in highly competitive environments must adapt quickly to their customers´ changing tastes as well as to new challenges in the marketplace. They need to recognize and respond to external opportunities and threats in order to survive and succeed. Therefore it would be beneficial for a company if its R&D teams could continue to learn new skills in order to respond to future challenges. Managers need to create an environment for their teams to succeed, and they should try their utmost to increase their teams´ motivation to learn. This article, in extending the concept of knowledge management, proves that nurturing an environment of knowledge sharing can motivate a team to learn. In addition, two methods are also provided to enable managers to efficiently foster knowledge sharing within a team. In this regard, knowledge sharing could be regarded as a function of how an atmosphere of trust is created and interdependence among tasks is managed.