Mental Models on Knowledge Workers and Their Management

This paper discusses mental models that researchers and managers of knowledge workers developed on knowledge workers and their management. Identification of mental models helps us to discover why managers behave and manage knowledge workers in a certain way. Regardless of organisation or the region, more and more employees can be classified as knowledge workers. Knowledge workers are employees whose major tool is their brain. They create, distribute and apply explicit as well as tacit knowledge when working. Knowledge workers are difficult to manage because of the intangibility of knowledge. This intangibility of knowledge makes the process of the work of knowledge workers invisible. Due to this invisibility, control of the process of work is difficult, if not impossible. The results of work of knowledge workers usually have a systemic impact on their constituents and their environment and they may differ from a short and long term perspective. Knowledge work demands employees with a much better education and training in a certain field. Many of them can and want to work and decide independently, even to manage themselves. Knowledge is fully owned by the knowledge worker and when they leave the company, knowledge leaves with them. These and many other specifics complicate the management of knowledge workers. Our previous research on knowledge workers and their management show that many managers are not aware of the specifics and dangers of working with knowledge and knowledge workers and they try to manage their subordinates in the traditional way through orders and control. To learn more about this problem, we tried to discover mental models researchers and managers of knowledge workers developed on management of knowledge workers. First, 30 articles and books were analysed to identify ideas on knowledge workers in existing literature and the mental models of the authors of these article and books on knowledge workers. To identify the mental models of managers, we used one of our previous researches on knowledge workers and their management. Mental models of both researchers and managers were identified by grounded theory.