Reengineering Information Sharing Behaviour in Organizations

Organizational restructuring focuses on making business operations more flexible and responsive to customers. This has led to team based decision authority structures and horizontal business processes. Concurrently, the management of information has been decentralized in many organizations. Horizontal processes create information interdependencies among previously independent tasks, and call for high levels of information sharing among decision units. However, the decentralization of information management raises the possibility that units controlling specific information repositories may not readily make them available in the required form to other units, leading to poor organizational payoff. Thus it is critical to create an environment which will promote effective information flows across the organization. We suggest that mechanisms involving organizational outlook, social orientation, equitable information processing capability and communication across decision units regarding information requirements can help mitigate the information sharing problem. Using stylized game-theoretic models, we show that these organizationally oriented mechanisms have a sound economic foundation. We use these results to build a managerial basis for improving information exchange.