Much research in recent years has focused on knowledge as a competitive advantage for contemporary organizations. It is generally accepted that management of knowledge as a resource is indispensable to create thriving organizations. Nevertheless, a common approach to successfully utilize this very resource has not yet been established among management scholars or practitioners. Hence, despite the enforcement of customized formal knowledge management structures and policies, organizations are perceiving it as a complex challenge. With the phenomenon of decoupling, New Institutionalism provides a widely accepted explanation of why formal processes often stay as myth and ceremony. The concept of decoupling argues that to ensure efficiency, organizational members create informal supplements for formally enacted processes. The aim of this thesis is to investigate if organizational decoupling processes and the efficiency of knowledge management are interconnected. A case study in Hilti, a multi-national market leader serving the construction industry has therefore been conducted. More specifically, the product development process of the organization served as a case. With data derived from interviews and field notes, the results indicate that there is a relation between organizational decoupling processes and the efficiency of knowledge management. This thesis concludes that first, (1) organizational decoupling processes and knowledge management have strong relations with each other. Second, (2) that decoupling processes are a reason why the management of explicit knowledge fails. And third, (3) for the efficient management of tacit knowledge, organizational decoupling processes are essential. These results suggest that new research in this area might be of need to support practitioners in making knowledge usable within organizations.
