Boosting Knowledge Management With the Help of Development Discussions

In companies the adoption of a competence approach in strategic management has led to new ways of defining, evaluating and developing competences with the help of a variety of practices and tools. One of the most common of them is appraisal discussions, in Finland more often called development discussions. The aim of this quantitative study is to investigate what kind of effects the development discussion system may have within an organization. This study clarifies the benefits of development discussions from the perspective of knowledge management. The empirical research showed that development discussions are an integral part of organizational knowledge management system in Finnish organizations. The results suggest that they boost competence management at a level of leader's work in two dimensions. First, development discussions are in connection to some degree with building a learning community and second, they are strongly in connection with planning the goals for learning in an organization.