Managing knowledge worker

Shandana Shuaib, Institute of Management Sciences, Hayatabad, Peshawar, Pakistan

Abstract

Knowledge workers are actually those workers in an organization who are sensitive to change. They constantly respond to the changes in the environment by gathering information and then arranging their work accordingly. With the accelerated pace of change, we should not hesitate in accepting the reality that all knowledge workers have significant place in the organization. The importance of their role to any organization that wants to survive in this dynamic epoch cannot be underestimated. Knowledge workers are indispensable for the organizations. They like to have complete autonomy in the work they perform. Their creativity and inquiry-driven learning may be difficult to achieve within traditional command-and-control paradigm. Too much stringency can be destructive to their creativeness and can have adverse effect on their performance. On the other hand too much leniency means giving them an absolutely freehand. Managers are faced with the dilemma of how to strike a balance between the two extremes. Proper management can best harness their potential and can further enhance their capabilities and get the most from these workers. Improving knowledge worker productivity is the most important task of the century. Yet we have few measures or management interventions to make such improvement possible. Although we can not cent percent identify the pattern which should be followed by knowledge workers because systems and processes in an organization are often regarded as a kiss of death to encouraging creativity, but this need not be the case. Without a system, the generation of ideas and application can be lost for ever. Therefore it is a challenge for the management as how to manage knowledge workers due to their importance and the unique role they play in the organization. The paper simply throws some light on how the interventions can act as tools for proper management of knowledge workers and for enhancing their performance.