Uncertainties as Barriers for Knowledge Sharing with Enterprise Social Media

Transferring knowledge has become a key challenge for global organizations and social media offers new opportunities to digitalize and support this process. However, the successful implementation of a social media based knowledge transfer environment is marked by several uncertainties that can become a barrier for the participants’ adoption. There is only limited existing research studying the types of uncertainties that employees perceive and their impact on knowledge transfer via social media. To address this gap, this article presents a qualitative interview-based study of the adoption of the Enterprise Social Media tool Yammer for knowledge sharing in a large global organization. We identify and categorize nine uncertainties that were perceived as barriers by the respondents. The study revealed that the uncertainty types play an important role in affecting employees’ participation and willingness to share. We further derive necessary critical managerial interventions that ensure a successful ESM implementation for knowledge sharing.