This paper aims to analyze, in organizations where employees share beliefs and understandings as to what is acceptable as a base for identifying, promulgating, sustaining and creating knowledge and understanding, how designing, setting-up and maintain...
This paper aims to analyze, in organizations where employees share beliefs and understandings as to what is acceptable as a base for identifying, promulgating, sustaining and creating knowledge and understanding, how designing, setting-up and maintaining such organizations depend, among other things, upon an efficient incentive structure to ensure the transmission and communication of knowledge and understanding within the organization to foster the emergence of new knowledge. This paper tries to analyze how organization, institutions or societies can help to sustain shared values among its members. Trust has increasingly played a key role in the effective functioning of most societies. This is especially true in the non Anglo-Saxon western world, where the explicit legal contract is relatively less important than the informal relationships build upon trust and understanding. Developing intra-organizational trust requires mechanisms to increase the level of communication and understanding. Our objective was to develop and refine the seminal idea of epistemic communities in a manner useful for understanding organizational design.