Why Communities of Practice (CoP) are ‘Still’ Relevant for the Organizations?

Abstract

There is a continuous scholarly debate on emerging structure of Communities of Practice (CoP) in modern organizations. The understanding of CoP differs among the organizations and so are the benefits. Over the years CoP concept has emerged and the new subsets are introduced such as Communities of Innovation (CoInv), Communities of Participation (CParp) and Communities of Creation (CoC). This paper proposes that CoP should evolve itself, not constructed in the organizations. Authors argue these communities emerged and evolved out of the need for doing something new and relevant in the organization. The paper draws upon existing research to substantiate their case-why communities of practice are still relevant for the organizations? The paper insinuates a practice-based-standpoint supported through semi-structured interviews with ten corporate executives to understand the relevance of CoPs in current environment. Through this research, authors are proposing SKLC (Stakeholder, Learning, Knowledge, Collaboration) framework to comprehend the embryonic construction of CoPs. The framework would describe the way of CoP is understood and explore how CoP stakeholders augment knowledge through learning and collaboration. Further, this paper examines how the companies can use CoP to improve internal communications, improve profitability and align their processes. 1. Understanding Communities of Practice (CoP) Right after graduating from the engineering school, Kartick joined a leading IT services company in Mumbai with the employee strength of over 15,000 people. He was struggling for the past few weeks to learn a specialize software tool. He was unable to find any support from his team seniors and colleagues, as the technology was fairly new. While sitting in the cafeteria during the afternoon break, he overheard the conversation about the same tool from somebody who perhaps works for another team. He walked over to their table and joined them for the conversation. Prashant, who was leading the discussion on the table, told Kartick about the informal online messaging group on 'WhatsApp'(Note 1). Kartick was pleasantly surprise to find over 120 members from his organization on the WhatsApp group who was sharing messages regarding the problems and solutions about the software tool (Note 2).