The culture and climate in or between organizations leads to the adoption of social norms, which exert social influence. Social influence occurs when an individual’s thoughts or actions are affected by other people.

According to Latané,

Social forces influence people on the same way as light bulbs shine on a surface.

The total amount of light cast on a surface depends on the strength of the bulbs, their distance from the surface and their number. The strength of a source is determined by his or her status, ability or relationship to a target.

The stronger the source, the greater the influence.

If a respected senior in an organization keeps reminding everybody that knowledge sharing is important it will have a greater impact, than when the young intern says so. When people view the other members of a group as competent, they are more likely to conform in their judgments. This underlines the importance of powerful change agents that have to endorse knowledge management in the organization in order for it to work out.

Immediacy refers to a source’s proximity in time and space to the target.

The closer to the source, the greater its impact.

The influence your direct supervisor from the field office has on you is bigger than that of the controller at the head office. Finally the theory predicts that as the number of sources increase, so does their influence – at least to a point. The more people actively endorse knowledge management practices, the more it becomes a subject within the organization, the more people will join in on the action.

The Social Impact Theory however also predicts that

People sometimes resist social pressure.

This resistance is most likely to occur when social impact is divided among many strong and distance targets. There should be less impact on a target who is strong and far from the source (for example the management team of a head office which stresses the importance of making time free for reflecting and sharing knowledge), than on one that is weaker but closer to the source (the field office manager who insists the work needs to be done, and reflecting and sharing knowledge is overestimated and costs valuable time and resources).

There is also less impact on a target that is accompanied by other target persons than one that stands alone. Conformity is reduced by the presence of an ally and obedience rates drop when people are in company of rebellious peers.

Conclusion

Those who want to implement new approaches such as knowledge management, should not underestimate the power of social factors that influence their target groups. Rebellion against new approaches can be extremely corrosive, and is not always visible on the surface.

At the same you can use these same social processes to win over strong allies and change agents, and use them to speed up the process of organization-wide acceptance of new approaches. Awareness and using these processes to your and the organization’s advantage are key success factors.