Barriers to Adoption of Ideas in Organisations

Barriers to adoption of ideas in organisations

Effective communication of ideas is crucial for companies to thrive in today’s competitive business environment. Without embracing the fast-changing world with positive attitudes and enabling the ideas to flow effectively across the organisations, success in innovation and continuous improvements for business operation cannot be achieved. Even those businesses that have made great efforts in coping with the change may have barriers to knowledge transfer and ideas adoption. The factors such as distrust in the employee-supervisor relationships, ineffective knowledge management within organisations and existence of cultural differences are considered to be the main obstacles to the ideas adoption in businesses. Therefore, this paper aims to demonstrate the negative impacts that these factors have on overall business development and the need for organisations to identified and overcome them.

Adoption of ideas can be impeded by the distrust between employees and their supervisors in an organisation. Mutual trust is an essential factor in effective communication and supervisors who are ready to value employees’ ideas and express an enthusiasm to listen and learn can more easily receive useful ideas and positive feedback from employees with trust. However, some leaders fail to see the usefulness of employees’ input because they believe what the employees do is for their personal interests rather than for the good of the collective (Morrison & Miliken 2000, cited in R. Detert et al. 2013, p625). Moreover, the distrusting supervisor-subordinate relationships negatively affect the employees’ level of performance and their willingness to speak up and share ideas. As Dedahanov and Rhee (2015) argued, individuals in organisations with the low level of trust in their supervisors regard speaking up as an unsafe and risky action. As a result, when an employee reduces trust in their supervisors, they are more likely to withhold their work-related opinions and concerns by becoming silent in order to protect themselves from getting into trouble such as punishment (Dedahanov & Rhee 2015). Accordingly, supervisors will lose useful feedback from employees that may help to correct misunderstandings and enhance overall work performance. Hence, building trust with employees enables good ideas to be easily heard and accepted in the organisation.

Lack of knowledge-sharing awareness can lead to ineffective communication among employees in organisations. According to Rivera-Vazquez et al. (2009, p.257), knowledge sharing is the process of mutually disseminating and exchanging existing knowledge and collectively create new knowledge. As the most valuable assets, knowledge plays a crucial role in gaining more competitive advantages for the companies (Cabrera & Cabrera, 2002, p688). For this reason, providing an open and user-friendly platform within the organisation can be seen as a conducive approach for individuals to share their knowledge and discover more new ideas to improve their professional skills and benefit the company as a whole. Even though a well-developed knowledge-management system is implemented in the organisation to facilitate ideas diffusion, the existence of some non-technological problems still need to be solved (Cabrera & Cabrera, 2002). For instance, some employees find difficulties in integrating the task of sharing personal insights with fellow co-workers into their everyday duties, or they are not aware of how can both individuals and organisation benefit from doing so, and consequently, unwilling to exchange what they know in organization (KPMG 2000, cited in Cabrera & Cabrera, 2002, p688). Not only that, Cabrera and Cabrera (2002, p.694) have argued that the non-equivalence between the costs and rewards for sharing information may also lead to employees’ reluctance to expose their own competitive advantages to others. To deal with these problems, it is necessary for supervisors to increase employees’ work flexibility and emphasise the benefits that they can gain from openly sharing good ideas and knowledge with others. In this way, ideas can be readily recognised and affirmed in organisations. Thus, good ideas are more likely to be adopted in a supportive and healthy information-sharing environment.