Application of the concept mapping to examin the important factors of knowledge management: A study on experts of Khuzestan's Jihad-eKeshavarzi organization

Knowledge management is essentially creation, discovering, organizing, application and sharing of knowledge as a resource. Competitive advantages are to be achieved when knowledge management play a major role into the long term policymaking of organizations. Human resources in each organization have a lot of knowledge of which they may not aware explicitly. Social background, political contexts and group or individual interests in specific interaction settings affect transferring this practical knowledge to others. To find out which factors should be taken into account to facilitate knowledge management in an agricultural organizations, this study was carried out in a qualitative manner. Several concept mapping exercises were devised to elicit the views of agricultural experts about the factors affecting knowledge transferring and management in their organization. The participants were selected through a snowball sampling method in which each participant was asked to introduce other potential information-rich cases about knowledge management. Results showed that two main factors are involved in motivating the knowledge management process: internal and external organizational environment. External factors included efficiency of human training systems such as universities, cooperation with other related organizations, institutes, and demanding informant clients. The internal environment per se divided into two categories: general atmosphere of organization and individual-related factors each one included different elements. Type of administrating system (governmental systems), application of information technology, in-service training courses, principal supportive views to motivate knowledge sharing, decision making process, knowledge preserving and protecting mechanism, accessibility to classified organizational information, task and duty manuals, rewarding system, human resource employing and retiring mechanism are the main internal factors which constitute the organization general atmosphere. In addition, personal characteristics of staffs, knowledge acquisition behavior, evaluation criteria of knowledge goodness, and need to knowledge management recognized as the main individual-related elements.