The concept of knowledge management was first introduced in the mid 90's and refers to identifying and leveraging the collective knowledge in an organisation to help the organisation compete (van Krogh, 1998). Recently, the amount of literature on this concept has been growing rapidly. Simple evidence for this is a search for "knowledge management- on the World Wide Web; which nowadays results in 1.360.000 hits, while this number was only 465.920 in the year 2000 (Alavi, 2000). At this point most of the literature focuses on theoretical issues that are leading practice. Although this is very important, at the same time, it seems vital that researchers also understand contemporary business practices and the issues being faced by contemporary organisations. Such knowledge of contemporary practices and experiences should better inform research efforts and further enable IS researchers to provide the both necessary and desirable solutions and guidance to future practice efforts (Leech and Sutton, 2002). We will examine one of these contemporary business practices: the implementation of reward systems. Previous research has shown that user participation is the most critical success factor when knowledge management is involved (Leech and Sutton, 2002). Since reward systems are able to stimulate employee behaviour towards certain company goals, it is expected that they can positively affect user participation in knowledge management systems (KMS). This paper will therefore investigate: Which type of reward systems can most effectively stimulate user participation in knowledge management systems and which type of reward should the company offer its employees?.
Literature Review.
In this section 4 types of rewarding systems will be discussed. Since some of the literature takes on a very general perspective, we will also try to provide some insights in how these reward systems specifically could stimulate user participation in KMS.
