The Workarounds Process as a Source of Knowledge Creation and Management

The dynamics of the actual global context create a growing need for creation of better knowledge management in organizations. More than ever global markets exercise a bottom-up pressure (market dynamics and daily practices) and a top-down pressure (standardization) on employees who must constantly create, acquire and disseminate new knowledge. Due to this, employees engage sometimes in workarounds that defy the standardization of expected performance. However, given that workarounds are deliberate actions in contrast with the prescribed practices, they are marginalized by organizations that perceive them as detrimental. In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework that is based on the idea that the integration of workarounds in the workplace represents a process of knowledge management. It also suggests that the use of a socio-technological tool that allows the building and sharing of workarounds by employees will help foster the creation and updating of knowledge in the organizational memory.